TV’ age is cool (36). Finally, McLuhan describes how cool mediums ‘need
to be completed by an audience’. However, the actual instances of cool
mediums he specifies – telephone, cartoon, speech (if taken as face-to-face),
the interactive seminar and dialogue – don’t actually have an ‘audience’,
whereas the hot mediums of radio, cinema, print and lectures do.
For McLuhan’s schema to have coherence, television should be
placed in the category of a hot medium. If this were done, his account would
make sense in terms of the first and second media age – corresponding to
what he calls the mechanical age versus cybernation. I point this out, not
in order to fit everything into the dualism that this distinction purveys,
but because McLuhan himself is inconsistent.
A final problem is the way the hot/cool distinction is over-extended
to include all manner of objects, past and present societies, stone and
paper, phonetics and writing, so much so that it dilutes itself by way of
a generalized and generalizing dualistic vitalism.
However, in differentiating between hot and cool media according
to definition and information, different technologies are clustered in aTheories of Cybersociety 71Features (McLuhan,
1964: 31–3)Examples (McLuhan,
1964: 31–2)Examples (McLuhan,
1964: 36)Hot mediums
Low participation
Extends one single
sense
High definition
A large amount of
informationTend to ovetake cool
mediums
Tend to be mechanical,
repetitive, uniform
Radio
Cinema
PhotographPhonetic alphabetPrintPaper
Lecture
Book
Past mechanical times
Developed countriesCool mediums
High participationLow definition
Small amount of
information
Need to be completed by
the audience
Tend to be supplanted and
remade by hot mediumsTelephone
Television
Cartoon
Speech
Hieroglyphic and
ideogrammatic written
characters
Monastic and clerical
script
Stone
Seminar
Dialogue
The contemporar y TV age
Underdeveloped countriesTable 3.2 Features and types of hot and cool mediumsHolmes-03.qxd 2/15/2005 10:31 AM Page 71