Marshall McLuhan's ideas on Media-- Blog Post #4

In this last lecture this week we talked a lot about McLuhan's idea of Hot vs Cool media. I found this topic especially intriguing and by the looks of the discussion board thus far, others in the class feel the same way. McLuhan understood media as comprising an environment and said it could only be understood by its effects and not its meaning. Our increased concern with the effects rather than meaning is a newer phenomenon that has arose during the electronic age we live in. He essentially believed that all media could be categorized as either hot or cool. Hot media is filled with high quality data, complete information so the audience does not have to fill in missing points, and it focuses mainly on a single sense. Whereas, cool media provide less data and the information leaves much to audience participation and completion while also engaging multiple senses loosely. This is all easy to understand, but what makes this concept tricky is which category McLuhan placed certain media in. Some forms of media like the telephone are particularly hard to categorize as hot or cool because it has elements of both. The telephone extends visual space and focuses on our auditory sense (hot media), but it also cannot be useful without having participation from someone on the other end of the phone call (cool media). I believe that there are elements of both cool and hot media in almost all media forms, meaning McLuhan should have made a third category titled something like 'lukewarm' or 'room temperature' media. 
Another idea on media by McLuhan that I found really interesting is his perception of them as an extension of our physical and nervous systems: speech as an extension of our inner consciousness, the wheel as an extension of our feet, phone extending our voice, radio extending our hearing etc. This got e to start thinking about what the internet would be an extension of. the conclusion I came to was that it was an extension of so many of our senses. It is an extension of our brain as we can share our knowledge and accumulate more knowledge; it is an extension of our voice as social media is all about sharing our opinions and lives with others; and in some ways it can also be an extension of our feet. We can travel anywhere in the world on the internet, as evidenced by our last blog post on the Vimy Ridge memorial in France, I was able to 'visit' the site virtually with ease. 


I mentioned how the telephone has elements of both hot and cool media. Is there any other examples of media that could fit into my new category of 'lukewarm' media that is both hot and cool?

Which aspect of McLuhan did you find most interesting?

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