technically constituted worlds because they are caught off guard by the
biases of print culture. Certain adjustments in psycho-social life are
necessary before we can face ‘electromagnetic technology’.
For McLuhan, information, rather than vision, becomes the basis of
the electric age. In a passage very similar to Jean-François Lyotard’s claims
in The Postmodern Condition(1984: 194), he argues that the era of cyberna-
tion is one in which prior forms of technological extension will not be
allowed to exist except by being translated into information systems
(McLuhan, 1967: 68; see also Innis, 1972).
A well-known distinction that McLuhan makes which roughly corre-
sponds to a first versus second media age thesis is that between ‘hot’ and
‘cool’ medium. Hot mediums include radio, movies, photographs. Cool
mediums include the telephone and TV.A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition’. High
definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visu-
ally, ‘high definition’. A cartoon is ‘low definition’, simply because ver y little
visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low
definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And
speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so
much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do
not leave much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media, are,
therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or
completion by the audience. (McLuhan, 1964: 31)These relationships can be represented as in Table 3.2. From this table it
can be observed that McLuhan partially subscribed to an ‘informational’
view of communication, in which senders and receivers become con-
nected by a message. The receiver of hot messages may have quite a bit of
work to do – depending on the medium. Notably also, McLuhan does not
distinguish between technologies of broadcast (like TV) and point-to-
point network technologies (like the telephone).
There are a number of difficulties with McLuhan’s explication of hot
and cool mediums, however – like his rather strained distinction between
cinema and television. Firstly, it is true that cinema is able to provide
‘more information’ than television, especially if a sense-impression view
is taken^20 – it has a wider screen – but the ability of television to convey
complexity is quite outstanding compared to other forms of media.
Secondly, McLuhan claims that hot mediums tend to extend only one
sense in high definition. His classification of cinema as ‘hot’ is glaringly
out of place in this regard. Thirdly, McLuhan claims that a cinema or radio
audience is passive whilst a television one is more active. During his own
time of writing and to date, no empirical audience studies have shown
this to be true. Fourthly, McLuhan contradicts himself where he says that hot
mediums tend to overtake cool mediums, but that, historically, it is ‘past
mechanical times’ that can be designated as hot’ whilst the ‘contemporary70 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-03.qxd 2/15/2005 10:31 AM Page 70