We seemed to first learn about this framework for understanding media when talking about the Kennedy/Nixon debates of 1960. It was said that Nixon won the debate on the radio, and that Kennedy won on television. Television, it was said, was a “cool medium,” while radio was a “hot medium.” Nixon was called ‘too hot’ for the cool medium of television. The words “hot” and “cool” were, and are, overdetermined. It’s very difficult to keep them focused to look through the lens that McLuhan provided.
Because television was (is) so new and we were struggling to comprehend its impacts on society, the idea of a cool medium stuck to television. However, all media have temperature characteristics, and as we look at text, hypertext, document-based web pages, and the real time web of FriendFeed, FaceBook, Microsoft Mesh and Google Wave — we might keep a thermometer handy. In order to better understand what McLuhan was getting at, let’s look at some fragments from his book, published in 1964, Understanding Media:
A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition.’ High definition is the state of being well-filled with data.
The telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in or completed by the listener.
On the other hand, hot media, are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.
The hotting up of the medium of writing to repeatable print intensity led to nationalism and the religious wars of the sixteenth century.
The waltz was a hot, fast mechanical dance suited to the industrial time in its moods of pomp and circumstance. In contrast, the Twist is a cool, involved and chatty form of improvised gesture.
If we journey into the thermoclines and fronts of the current media environment, the places where hot and cool touch, we’ll find a turbulent search for identity.
Newspapers have employed the medium of typography, ink and paper to translate and relay stories back to the culture. The hot textual medium of the newspaper is dumbfounded by the cool medium of hypertext on the Web. The typical complaints are trotted out, this cool new medium doesn’t have the high definition professionalism/specialization of the incumbent hot medium. Attempts are made to colonize it by heating it up and filtering out the high-definition bits. But the reverse is happening, the cool medium is engulfing the hot medium.
Public relations has traditionally been a hot medium deploying high definition communications to influence the direction of public opinion. As social networks have emerged as the most visible sites for the citation of public opinion, the corporate communications industry has been serving up recipes for the best method of heating up ‘communities.’ We might ask, once a community has been fully cooked, will it have any flavor left?
The economics of high and low definition media are very different. When the anchors on CNN read tweets on air for an hour, their advertisers are being cheated. They’re paying for high-definition hot media, and they’re getting a relayed and filtered low-definition signal instead.
The blending of Hot and Cool media is a new media type. The result shouldn’t be luke warm– the hot needs to stay hot; and the cool must stay cool. As McLuhan reminds us, the content of the new media is the old media. Our fingers are twitching nervously over the remote control as we endlessly change the channel searching for the new container…
“But almost everyone agrees that no one can make sense out of more than 10% of what McLuhan says..”
It occured to me that the linear quality of time shouldn’t be an obstacle to a good interview. And there are some questions I needed to ask McLuhan. There’s a sense in which questions and answers can address each other across time. This connected up to Jeff Jonas’s thinking on Perpetual Analytics or what he describes as real-time situational analytics– the idea of changing the time context of a database from polling to data streams. In his blog post, Sequence Neutrality in Information Systems, Jonas asks the question: “What if the question being asked today is not a smart question until next Thursday?”
In reading McLuhan’s work from 1964, I got the sense that he was providing answers to questions that his contemporaries could not yet formulate. Jonas posits a data ground where data finds data, and relevance will find the user. McLuhan’s answers seemed to be seeking out my questions.
echovar: The transition from visual space to acoustic space seems to be a key to understanding– among other things in your work, the oft-quoted fragment “the medium is the message.” Can you discuss the idea of acoustic space and what makes it different?
McLuhan: The new environment of simultaneous and diversified information creates acoustic man. He is surrounded by sound– from behind, from the side, from above. His environment is made up of information in all kinds of simultaneous forms, and he puts on this electrical environment as we put on our clothes, or as the fish puts on water.
Acoustic space is created by our ability to hear from all directions at once. Electric information arrives from all quarters at once. Thus, in effect, acoustic environments were created by the telegraph and began to show up in the press as mosaics of juxtaposed and discontinuous items all under one dateline. Acoustic space is all touch and interplay, all resonance and sympathy. Acoustic space is like the relationship of mother and child, which is audile-tactile, sound and touch. The cooing and handling and touching– this is the kind of world the electric media put around us. The electric media are a mom-and-child or rock-and-roll relationship.
The acoustic or simultaneous space in which we now live is like a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose margins are nowhere. Acoustic space cannot be cut up into pieces, as visual space can. It is both compressed and indivisible.
echovar: As your thinking matured, you migrated from the long form essay to the probe– the fragment and the aphorism. In the age of Twitter, we sometimes feel that depth is sacrificed to brevity. Can you address how depth is preserved in the compression of your thought?
McLuhan: In the work of Harold Innis, each sentence is a compressed monograph. He includes a small library on each page, and often incorporates a small library of references on the same page in addition. Most writers are occupied in providing accounts of the contents of philosophy, science, libraries, empires and religions. Innis invites us instead to consider the formalities of power exerted by these structures in their mutual interaction. He approaches each of these forms of organized power as exercising a particular kind of force upon each of the other components in the complex. By bouncing the unknown form against known forms, he discovered the nature of the new or little known form.
I call this method a probe. The probe is a means or method of perceiving. It resists any single point of view; it’s a better form than expository prose for examining our time because it works by gaps and interfaces. For instruction, use incomplete knowledge so people can fill things in– they can round it out and fill it in with their own experiences. There’s no participation in just telling: that’s simply for consumers– they sit there and swallow it, or not. These probes might easily be tweets:
“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
“The only cool PR is provided by one’s enemies. They toil incessantly and for free.”
“Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another.”
“A frontier is not a neighborhood. It is a gap, a ferment, an interface.”
echovar: What is the shape of the digital body in the globally networked village?
McLuhan: During the mechanical ages we extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as the planet is concerned.
My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.
Any medium presents a figure whose ground is always hidden or subliminal. In the case of TV, as of the telephone or radio, the subliminal ground could be called the disincarnate or disembodied user. This is to say that when you are “on the telephone” or “on the air,” you do not have a physical body. In these media, the sender is sent and is instaneously present everywhere. The disembodied user extends to all those who are recipients of electric information. It is these people who constitute the mass audience, because mass is a factor of speed rather than quantity, although popular speech permits the term mass to be uses with large publics. Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not physical quantity.
echovar: Talk about the role of time– clock time and real time in the new media landscape.
McLuhan: As a piece of technology, the clock is a machine that produces uniform seconds, minutes, and hours on an assembly-line pattern. Processed in this uniform way, time is separated from the rhythms of human experience. The mechanical clock, in short, helps create the image of a numerically quantified and mechanically powered universe. By coordinating and accelerating human meetings and goings-on, clocks increase the sheer quantity of human exchange.
The point of the matter of speed-up by wheel, road, and paper is the extension of power in an ever more homogeneous and uniform space. Thus, the real potential of the Roman technology was not realized until printing had given road and wheel a much greater speed than that of the Roman vortex. Yet the speed-up of the electronic age is as disrupting for literate, lineal, and Western man as the Roman paper routes were for tribal villagers. Our speed-up today is not a slow explosion outward from center to margins but an instant implosion and an interfusion of space and functions. Our specialist and fragmented civilization of center-margin structure is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous reassembling of all its mechanized bits into an organic whole. This is the new world of the global village.
When you hear the word “progress,” you know you are dealing with a nineteenth-century mind. Progress literally stopped with electricity because you now have everything at once. You don’t move on from one thing at a time to the next thing. There is no more history; it’s all here. There isn’t any part of the past that isn’t with us, thanks to electricity. But it’s not thanks to print, it’s not thanks to photography, it’s thanks to electricity. Speed, huge speed-up, means there’s no more past. Now, there is no more history.
echovar: We seem to have a hard time coming to terms with our new media/social landscape. Why is it so difficult to perceive and talk about the environment we inhabit?
McLuhan: It is very hard to get a man in the print belt of culture to recognize that the form of print is itself cutural and deeply biased. The fish knows nothing of water.
Our typical response to disruptive new technology is to recreate the old environment instead of heeding the new opportunities of the new environment. Failure to notice the new opportunities is also failure to understand the new powers.
Nobody yet knows the language inherent in the new technological culture; we are all deaf-blind mutes in terms of the new situation. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us by referring to the previously existent, not to the present.
The environment is always “invisibile” and its contents is always the old technology. The guy who is going to use a superhighway thinks he is the same man who used the dirt road it replaced… He doesn’t notice that the highway has changed his relation to his family and his fellows.
In television (and computers), images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (The fish knows nothing of water)
{McLuhan’s mosaic of answers culled from: Understanding Media, The Book of Probes and On McLuhan: Forward Through the Rearview Mirror.}
As social networks emerge as the dominant framework for message traffic on the Network, the question of “monetization” is repeated again and again like a drum beat. There seems to be an expectation that someone will figure out how to bind the advertising subsidized broadcast/print model on to the message flow and/or the social graph itself. In order to persist, these social networks, at some point, will need to generate free cash flow (capital).
Money (capital) is the currency of the industrial age– in a sense, it is the equivalent of Democritus’s atom.
The atomists held that there are smallest indivisible bodies from which everything else is composed, and that these move about in an infinite void space.
A tribal and feudal hierarchy of the traditional kind collapses quickly when it meets any hot medium of the mechanical, uniform, and repetitive kind. The medium of money or wheel or writing, or any other form of specialist speed-up of exchange and information, will serve to fragment a tribal structure. Similarly, a very much greater speed-up, such as occurs with electricity, may serve to restore a tribal pattern of intense involvement such as took place with the introduction of radio in Europe, and is now tending to happen as a result of TV in America. Specialist technologies detribalize. The non-specialist electric technology retribalizes.
As we stand along the frontier of a new kind of retribalization, we look at the currency in our pockets and wonder what the exchange rate might be. Celebrities and the rich enter the social networks hoping the dollar capital they’ve accumulated can be exchanged for social capital. The metaphor of “capital” has replaced the metaphor the “atom.”
They (the !Kung) have an intricate system of banking their social relationships and calling on them when times get rough. The system is maintained through gift giving, storytelling and visiting. It works like insurance does in our culture. …The Bushmen used storytelling to keep feelings for distant persons alive. The gifts are their way of telling the receiver, “I’ve held you in my heart.” Over the years, I saw this repeated many, many times. It would turn out that the !Kung spent as much as three months a year visiting “exchange partners,” and this was the key to their survival.
The social relationship was a reminder to the exchange partner that they had a kind of contract to call on each other in times of need. Wiessner believes that the invention of social networks– the storing of relationships for a time when you need them– is what facilitated the eventual migration of humans from Africa to the rest of the world.
Cory Doctorow posited Whuffie as a replacement for capital. In trying to think and speak about the kind of exchange and storing of tribal relationship value, we rely heavily on the language of capital, currency, purchase and banking. These are the atomic elements of our industrial age framework for understanding. The Gesture Bank was the first effort to formalize this set of ideas in the nomenclature of the previous era. These tentative efforts at articulation should be thought of as what McLuhan called a probe. They are by design incomplete and present gaps and interfaces that invite participation. Gillmor moves the ball forward with his exploration of dynamic links. Arrington probes the purchase that retweet will attain. The probe continues its mission.
There’s a poetic enterprise that must be undertaken as well. New metaphors, stories and music must be forged to tell ourselves the story of what is happening to us. Not in the future, but right now. McLuhan was also eloquent on this:
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
A small thought experiment: The video above was made on May 18, 1960 and features Marshall McLuhan. The subject is ‘literary man’ and ‘electronic man.’ It’s a description of the transition from the solitary world of the book to the tribal world of electronic media. Watch the video above and substitute the words “RSS” for “Book” and “Tw*tter” for “Electronic Media.” Think about the message in the characteristics of these two kinds of media.
Of course any reference to McLuhan’s work in public is a risk.
What are we doing when we use RSS? Are we solitary or social? Can we share using the electronic method– by hyperlink? Or do we share like we do with a book, by making a copy, or loaning the book itself. While the RSS feed has a location in the Network’s name space, the item we’d like to share must be xeroxed, put in an envelope and mailed.
When McLuhan talks about his idea that the ‘Medium is the Message‘ he immediately refers to the qualities of space as they relate to our senses. Think about how RSS and Tw*tter manifest in the space of the Network. If the value of a node in a Network is its capacity for connection to other nodes, then what is the value of RSS in light of the social web? In what sense can RSS be said to take advantage of a network effect?
It must have been a strange experience to be Marshall McLuhan in 1960. The world was compelled to listen, held rapt, but unable to grasp his meaning. They knew there was something there, but it seemed continually just over the horizon.
