“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”
– Marshall McLuhan
Marshall Mcluhan was a man of many ideas, one of his most prominent was his idea of hot and cool media.
Marshall McLuhan coined the term Hot and Cool media when he divided media into two distinct categories: 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, visually, “high definition.” A cartoon is “low definition,” simply because very little visual information is provided. Speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation/completion by the audience. Therefore a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.
But what about today?
In this modern age the line between ‘Hot’ and ‘cool’ media is beginning to blur; when television came out it could be considered ‘cool’ since you could interact with which channel you could watch, however you were still forced to watch whatever show was playing. Thanks to the internet, users can watch whatever they want, wherever they want, however they want. And music is being allowed to develop and grow outside of the norm of radio and television.
Will Mcluhan’s Ideas still be relevant 20 years from now?
Ghost of a Concrete World 