Canadian Communication Thought Fall 2022

Hello, my name is Sebastian, and I am a fourth-year Communications/Cultural Studies student. For this post, I wanted to discuss social media relationships/friendships. Interestingly, this generation has normalized the concept of making friends on various social media platforms but, more commonly, has used social media to maintain relationships that would otherwise be dormant. For example, I met two siblings in Punta Cana while on vacation with my cousins in 2017. They are from Pennsylvania, and had it not been for connecting on social media; we would not have stayed in touch with them. Over the last 5 years, we have spoken on birthdays and congratulated each other on significant life events, such as Graduation, birthdays, personal accomplishments etc. Without social media, relationships like this were not typically kept up and did not stay very consistent. I find it quite interesting that we have found ways to stay connected, while being so far apart from one another. Discussion: Is th...

     Marshall McLuhan is one of the most influential thinkers of our time. He is known for his hot and cool media theory, which argues that the medium in which a message is conveyed has a significant impact on how people receive it. McLuhan believed that the way we communicate today is completely different from how we did in the past, and that this has had a major impact on society. He argued that the hot media (such as television) are warm and fuzzy, while the cool media (such as newspapers) are cold and objective. McLuhan believed that society is changing rapidly due to the way we consume information, and that this will have lasting effects on our culture.      I would argue that McLuhan would distinguish the Freedom Convoy as an example of both hot and cool media. The coverage of the convoy via news commentators and radio broadcasters falls into McLuhan’s category of hot media, since it does not require as much participation from the public. Furthermore,...

 

 

 

 

 

  Marshall McLuhan is known for many of his concepts. His concept of hot and cool media arguably may stand out the most in terms of popularity. That being said, before answering the discussion question, it is important to understand what McLuhan means by hot and cool media. For me, this concept is a bit tricky to understand as I believe there is a sort of spectrum rather than two distinct categories of hot and cool media. From my understanding, McLuhan refers to an audience's ability to process information through social environments. In other words, it is based on sensory levels. For example, high-functioning senses would be considered hot media, and lower sensory ratios would be cool media.  That being said, I argue that the freedom convoys social media is what McLuhan refers to as both hot and cool media. As mentioned before, I believe there is a sort of spectrum or context that influence which form something is classified. As a result, I would argue the social media us...

  The Freedom Convy consisted of a chain of protests and blockades which began in January of 2022. It first started off as a protest against COVID-19 vaccine mandates but soon after evolved into a fight against all COVID-19 mandates. The main way in which this protest was organized was through the use of social media platforms like tiktok and facebook groups rather than an in person setting (Osman, 2022). The use of social media permitted the protest to raise funds and connect individuals despite any distance but this also meant that many of the stories circulating in the media about this topic had little to no information backing up any of these theories(Osman, 2022). By not having a singular reliable source individuals do not get proper factual information which they would usually receive from news outlets and rather get fed nonsense to keep them engaged. Since there was tremendous room for misinterpretation, many groups started to use random conspiracy theories as a way to excus...

  Hi everyone, The so-called "freedom convoy" may have outwardly projected ideology around freedom of bodily autonomy and vaccine mandates. However, the internal drumming up of far-right fringe politics on social media by political groups clouded the message and actions of participants; it also invited actors who are more interested in chaos than organized civil disobedience. It is this devolution into chaos, honking horns in Ottawa continuously through the night, vandalism, and messages of hate to be "heard" by the Canadian government that influences my argument towards labelling the use of social media, in this case, as "cool media." As we have discussed in class, the concept of hot and cool media comes from Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan. While the concept is still difficult to fully understand in absolute terms for me, it is clear that McLuhan is interested in providing conceptual tools for others to understand their environment through the mediums ...

The chosen discussion for this week revolves around the Freedom Convoy, which occurred this past year involving citizens who protested against the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Protests were held in Ottawa by citizens and vehicles expressing their frustration with the restrictions imposed during the pandemic, specifically the vaccination mandate for truckers.  I feel that McLuhan would most likely consider the convoy itself to be cool media, as it heavily relied on audience participation and required active engagement from Canadian citizens. Social media was also heavily utilized in this convoy, with posts, tweets, and other online platforms being used as primary tools.  Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram gave voices to the convoy communities, amplifying their messages and offering an interactive and participatory platform to share stories and experiences.  According to the articles, the convoy used social media platforms to further create these communities a...

“Communication mediates social relations by materializing them across time or space (Berland, pg.99)”. One of our readings discussed technological nationalism by saying communication technology favoured “centres of power and promotes the suppression of marginal experiences (Charland, pg. 321)”. I am not sure about the truth of the suppression or marginal experience part of the convoy, but I wonder if this was the shared thought that led to the convey going to Ottawa. The distinction between hot and cold medium by McLuhan is seen in the level to which information is fillable by the audience and thus produces high levels of participation. I think that this reveals why it might be so fillable because people persons get to add their own interpretations and understanding in hopes of filling the in the gaps. This is related to concepts such as participatory culture by Henry Jenkins, where people essentially create their own community (digital or not) to form meaning. The article Close to ...

For this blog post, I will be using Marshall McLuhan’s medium theory and the analysis of media forms practices in Understanding Media as a conceptual lens, to speculate whether McLuhan would view the convoy and its use of social media as an example of hot media or cool media. I will begin with a short summary of the “Freedom Convoy,” and a short summary of McLuhan’s Hot versus Cool media theory, then conclude by answering whether the convoy is a Hot media or a Cool media.  Thousands of protesters walked the streets of Ottawa, devoted to staying until all COVID-19 mandates and restrictions were removed. The so-called “Freedom Convoy” assembled in various locations across Canada to fight COVID-19 mandates and restrictions. Thousands of people assembled on Parliament Hill and the eager citizens began by blocking the streets with their large trucks, the city of Ottawa had a significant amount of traffic, transit delays, and disruptions with the loud sounds of honking and chanting. As t...

Hi everyone!  Before I answer this week’s blog prompt, I want to establish a few key points of McLuhan’s medium theory in order to predict how he would interpret social media as a communicative medium. As we have discussed in our class, McLuhan’s approach to interpreting different media forms focuses on how they construct a social environment that can vary the meaning and sense of the information that is being communicated. Particularly, McLuhan explains that a medium can be seen as an extension of our human senses. This causes different media to favour certain senses which influences how we interpret meaning within the barriers of that sense. For example, since radio privileges the sense of hearing, this then causes receivers of its message to perceive its message within the limitations of hearing. Thus, this idea of media as an extension of human senses has certain implications regarding how different media can shape our social environments and cultural communicative practices....

A prominent idea in Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media is looking at media as either hot or cold. Hot media demands a viewer's attention whereas cold media requires conscious participation by the medium’s consumer. Examples of hot media include; photographs, print, and radio. On the contrary cold media includes the; telephone, seminars and television. To reiterate, the differentiating factor between the two is audience involvement.  The freedom convoy took the nation by storm in early 2022. As most of you probably know, the freedom convoy was a nationwide protest against the vaccine mandate instituted by Trudeau’s government. The convoy made its way to Ottawa as hundreds protested outside of the Parliament building for a number of weeks. So, is the freedom convoy hot or cold media? I personally feel that it is difficult to categorize the convoy as one or the other which therefore makes it a combination of both. As we know hot media demand’s a viewer's attention a...

The Freedom Convoy of February 2022, in which protestors took over the streets of Ottawa, would not have been possible without social media. Right wing individuals on social media apps such as Facebook and Tiktok expressed that they felt the government was stifling their freedom with vaccine and mask mandates meant to control the spread of COVID-19. When truckers were told they couldn't enter the USA unless they were fully vaccinated, this set social media ablaze, and people opposed to the mandates agreed they had to do something. The solution was to occupy the parliament building and surrounding areas in Ottawa. The protests caused problems with individuals engaging in activities such as dancing on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and displaying racist symbols such as the swastika and Confederate flag. After over a month of protesting, the Emergency Act was invoked and the police forced the protests to be shut down.  If McLuhan could have witnessed the formation of the Freedom Conv...

Marshall McLuhan's medium theory, as outlined in his book Understanding Media, distinguishes between hot and cool media. Hot media are those that provide a high degree of sensory information, such as radio, which provides a rich auditory experience. Cool media, on the other hand, provide less sensory information and require more active participation from the audience, such as television. In the case of the freedom convoy and its use of social media, it's possible that McLuhan would view it as a combination of hot and cool media. The use of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to organize the convoy and share information about it would likely be seen as a cool medium, as it requires active participation from users to engage with and share the information. This was referenced in the article by CBC where they called social media the “central nervous system” of the convoy as individuals across the nation used social media platforms to spread information, organize pro...

    The Freedom Convoy &  McLuhan's Medium Theory - By Sarah Humphreys      McLuhan's medium theory is the ideology of the ways media affects society, becoming an extension of the human senses. There is an emphasis on the importance of not only observing media forms but understanding how media disrupt tradition and reshape social life (Herman, 2022). Medium theory privileges the exploration of media environments and the human interactions they encourage, as well as the messages which a medium conveys. McLuhan created two categories of media forms, hot and cool media. These categories are used to classify the different privileges of each media form. Hot media has a high definition, engaging only a single sense, meaning there is less context to be interpreted by the audience. Hot media is seen to "spoon feed" (Herman, 2022), information to audiences, requiring less brain power. Whereas, cool media has a low definition, meaning the audience has more involv...

       In the early stages of 2022 many upset Canadians took to the capital in a protesting effort. The initial convoy movement was started to oppose vaccination requirements for crossing the U.S. border, but it later became a protest against COVID-19 requirements in general. A rally on Parliament Hill on January 29, 2022, brought together hundreds of vehicles that had formed convoys from various locations on January 22 and traveled through several Canadian provinces. Thousands of protesters on foot joined the convoys. Provincial capitals and border crossings with the United States were blocked by several offshoot protests. Unions and the trucking industry slammed the convoy. The majority of protesters, according to the Canadian Trucking Alliance, had no connection to trucking. Multiple weapons were seized near a blockade in Coutts, Alberta, and four men were charged with conspiring to kill Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers. Officials were conce...

For this blog post, I have chosen to discuss an article I read in my first year at Toronto Metropolitan University while studying philosophy. The article was published in the year 2008 and written by Nicholas Carr titled ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ for The Atlantic . He begins by introducing the end scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Dave Bowman is disconnecting the memory circuits that control supercomputer HAL’s artificial brain while HAL is begging Bowman to stop because he can “feel his mind going.” Carr uses this example as an analogy, for how he has also felt. As if someone has been remapping the neural circuitry and reprogramming the memory in his brain, he states not being able to think the way he used to.  Carr’s main argument is that the internet has damaging effects on people’s abilities and attention spans. Whether it be reading books, e-mails, blog posts, or jumping from link to link, the internet has forever made its way into our lives. It ha...

The Freedom Convoys effective use of social media astounded me and proves how social media has evolved the meaning of a personal  relationship with someone. A group of protest organizers are said to have communicated over Facebook  and TikTok and set up this whole plan online without ever meeting one another physically until the convoy began (Osman, 2022). McLuhan believed that no medium remains static, and that when interacting with other mediums, they evolve; just like how speech is the medium from which subsequent tech extensions have evolved. Social media is an evolution of the internet that allows us to interact with others over vast distances instantaneously and thus, allowed these organizers to feel personally  connected while not being connected physically. I think that McLuhan would view those directly involved with the Freedom Convoy as an example  of cool media of television rather than hot media of radio mainly because of the quality of information and th...

  Hi everyone!  For this blog post, I am interested in outlining Marshall Mcluhan’s Hot and Cool media theory. In particular, this post will use his theory to dissect the similarities and differences between how radio and podcasting are typically consumed in contemporary culture. Ultimately, the goal of this post is to illustrate how modern-day podcasting’s technological affordances allow for a more cool communicative method in comparison to traditional radio broadcasting.   McLuhan's Hot and Cool media theory categorizes different media forms based on how the receiver experiences its content. Specifically, for McLuhan, different media forms demand varying degrees of audience participation which impacts how one extracts meaning. Hot media is largely defined by its “high definition” as it focuses on one singular sense (ex: auditory, visual, etc). This intensification of a single sense facilitates the demand of a viewer’s attention as it does not leave much context to ...

  CS 304-Canadian Communication Thought Fall 2022 Final Blog Post During the past six weeks, the Public Order Emergency Commission has held hearings into the causes, consequences, ad aftermath of the so-called “Freedom Convoy” occupation of downtown Ottawa during January and February of 2002 and the Trudeau government’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act to end the occupation and clear the protestors from the streets of Ottawa. One of the facets of the convoy and the occupation that was discussed at the hearings was the centrality of social media to the organization of the convoy before the occupation, as well as the occupation itself when the convoy reached Ottawa.  Using McLuhan’s medium theory and analysis of media forms practices in Understanding Media as a conceptual lens, speculate as to whether McLuhan would view the convoy and its use of social media as an example of hot media or cool media. More specifically, would McLuhan see the convoy more like the cool med...

For this week’s discussion post, I have chosen to discuss McLuhan’s concept of advertising and the “American Dream.” As part of our class lectures, we discussed the American Dream and its connection to consumer capitalism and commodity fetishism. In the American Dream, a person lives their best life, having high status, money, and happiness all at once. This was brought about by advertising, which has transformed consumption and created the idea that a more satisfying lifestyle depends on consuming goods and services that create euphoric happiness and fulfillment. Thus, consumers are manipulated into buying products based on their desire rather than their actual need. According to McLuhan, consumer capitalism is the American Dream. It conveys the idea that more is better. Using mass marketing concepts, advertising agencies and corporations have increased consumer demand, pushing them towards hyper-consumption. As McLuhan noted, commodity fetishism has transformed the human relationship...

Main Idea A prominent idea in the teachings of McLuhan is that the media is an extension of ourselves. He proceeds to say that the wheel extends our feet, the phone extends our voice and television extends our eyes and ears. Now upon hearing this idea for the first time I was rather confused (as most of us probably were). It was when examples were provided that it all began to make sense. The way we connect and communicate with one another is almost entirely media based (the extension of ourselves). As productive as this may seem McLuhan voices concern with this premise. He says; “Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extension of man – the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.” I for one would argue that we are currently living in this reality. All forms of communication and media have overtaken our thoughts, communication and daily practices. The ensuing questi...

One of Marshall McLuhan's main theories was about how media is an extension of ourselves. Some examples of this include the internet and social media being an extension of the nervous system, clothing being an extension of the body and makeup being an extension of the face. I would like to relate McLuhan's theory to transgender individuals, particularly transgender celebrities, and the way that they use media to present themselves.  Most people don't think very much about media such as clothing or even social media being an extension of ourselves, we simply dress in a way that we feel comfortable and post what we like. For trans people however, they recieve excessive scrutiny for the way they present themselves using media. A good example of this would be the online presence and controversy surrounding Dylan Mulvaney. Dylan Mulvaney is a Broadway actor who came out as a trans woman in 2022. She has created a series called "Days of Girlhood" on Tiktok where she sha...

Blog Post #4 - McLuhan's Hot and Cool Media Theory - By Sarah Humphreys In this blog post, I have decided to discuss McLuhan's hot and cool media theory. I found this theory particularly interesting when discussing it in class this past Wednesday, as this understanding of media motivates new ways of thinking about mediums and their reshaping of social life. McLuhan's theory states that hot media possesses high intensity, meaning it demands viewers' attention, is filled with data and presents information leaving little room to be filled by an audience. Examples of hot media include but are not limited to, print, photographs, films, and books. Whereas, cool media provides less data, low definition, and embodies high levels of participation by the audience. Examples of cool media include but are not limited to the telephone, cartoons, orality, and television.  This theory is designed to expose the "experiences and effects of how we use media" (Herman, 2022), intr...