Repost: originally written for my Social Media Mashups class, and posted on inc.ongruo.us
The following is my reaction to Eduardo Navas’ excellent article posted on Remix Theory, about how McLuhan’s ideas about “Hot & Cold” media apply to a contemporary media landscape that is vastly different from the milieux in which McLuhan was writing in the 60′s. I originally posted this on the Social Media Mashup blog.
After Media (Hot & Cold) begins with Navas’ discussion of Marshal McLuhan’s 1964 theory of “Hot and Cold” media, published in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McLuhan defines “hot” media as those which are loaded with information and streams one-way towards a passive receiver. Cold media is “dumber” and requires more participation on the part of the user. The first sentence I have scribbled in the margins of my printout of Navas’ post is: “Hot/Cold are irrelevant. Why are we even still talking about this? We need a new metaphor, new philosophers.” I wrote this because it seemed like media was a lot simpler when McLuhan was writing, and could be boiled down to an understandable dichotomy, whereas today media has gotten far too complex for binaries. As it turns out, I scribbled a bit too soo, as this is partly what Navas’ essay turned out to be about.
One of Navas’ main theses in this article is that media is being “cooled” by the devices on which they are delivered, but makes the point (often) that this is not just driven by technology, but he implies that corporate greed is also at work, in that “the cooling of hot and cold media is used to push people to consume increasingly.” Later in the article, he says [the cooling has] “taken place out of economic interests from media developers who need to find ways to stay productive.” I won’t say there isn’t some truth to what he’s saying, after all profit is in fact the raison d’etre of pretty much all corporations. However, having worked in digital media for television for the past 12 years, I can say with some confidence that it’s less about some corporate conspiracy to “drive for profits” but largely that media is just following technology. And why shouldn’t it? What’s wrong with staying productive? This is what businesses need to do to survive. Also, with this cooling of media, users expect to have more control over the media they consume, and it’s imperative that content creators are able to live up to that expectation and deliver a positive experience in that regard, which means making the content available on as many platforms as possible and as often as possible. It only makes good business sense to do so.
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