To break down the hot media vs. the cold media:
Hot Media
Extends one sense in high definition.
Leaves little for the audience's imagination, little for the audience to fill in.
Radio
Movie
Cold Media
The audience gets relatively little information.
The audience has to fill in the blanks, and therefore participate.
Telephone
human speech
TV
Page 24
"A tribal and feudal hierarchy of traditional kind collapses quickly when it meets any hot medium of the mechanical, uniform, and repetitive kind." But McLuhan also writes that radio RE-tribalized Europe after its introduction... (leading to WWII...?) Huh?
Page 27
"Backward countries are cool, and we are hot."
"The mechanical [industrial] age was hot, and we of the TV age are cool"
(Related from page 23 -- the written word was "hotted up" by the introduction of print, leading to nationalism and religious wars in 16th century in Europe.
Page 30/31
"The hot radio medium used in cool or non-literate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment. A cool or low-literacy culture cannot accept hot media like movies or radio as entertainment. They are, at least, as radically upsetting for them as the cool TV medium has proved to be for our high literacy world."
Rwanda genocide and radio connection?
Page 31
Paraphrase -- A cool media like TV demands the process (of rehearsing a symphony) be shown. A hot media like radio prefers the neat tight package of simply the finished work.
But is this just a reflection of the realities of the two media? A symphony rehearsal plays the the strength of radio: audio. You can't broadcast the audio of a rehearsal, because the drama in the rehearsal is in the interaction of the people, the body language and emotion people show on their faces. TV needs things to SHOW things happening. The actual performance might be visually boring -- it is just a bunch of people in tuxedoes sitting around. Showing musicians talking or moving, gesturing or showing emotion as they struggle to learn a new piece has visual drama, and is therefore better for TV. All of that would come out during rehearsal, and be concealed for the real performance, because of the (cool media?) demands of performing in a concert hall.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Matt, could it be that the central part is the clash of cultures, where people accustomed to one medium have to deal with a hotter one or much cooler one?
ReplyDeleteAlso, perhaps tv was once, in black and white and low-fi, a cooler medium than it is now.