Hot and cold media are important concepts for McLuhan. ‘Hot’ and ‘cold’ are slightly misleading names. The basic opposition is between high definition/low participation and low definition/high participation media. It is, say, the difference between a live action film and a drawn animation. With live action the visual detail is fairly rich, leaving little room for the viewer to fill in/interpret. With a drawn cartoon (a good example being Matt Groening cartoons) there is minimal visual information, few lines, few surfaces, and wide room for viewer inference.
Why should hot and cold media bother us? I think, firstly, because it is a useful way to track cultural development. Ruling classes attempt to develop culture appropriate to its rule. This means that culture is a site of conflict in class society. In Understanding Media, McLuhan cites the example of the waltz (a ‘hot’ dance) versus the twist (a ‘cool’ dance).
Dance is an expression of sexuality. The waltz, a formal dance, where the information is largely filled in beforehand, was consistent with early capitalism and its attempt to mould sexuality to the nuclear family and capital accumulation. The twist is an informal dance, with room to improvise and, most dangerously of all, does not require two closely locked partners. The twist and related forms of dance were consistent with a period of affluence and immanent sexual liberation. They were consequently terrifying to authorities committed to the capitalism and sexual propriety. Let’s not forget the added bourgeois horror of mixed race social dancing. It may seem unbearably backward and strange now but American cops used to attack Ray Charles concerts for precisely this reason (brilliantly evoked in Mike Davis’s writings on post-war youth riots).
But there’s a second point of interest. In McLuhan’s scheme new media cause a shock to our system. In order to overcome this shock, so we aren’t sent reeling every time we walk down the street or glance at a TV, we numb ourselves to the medium’s effects. One way of doing this is by cooling down the medium.
The printed word is visually hot. Spoken word on the radio is aurally hot. They each take particular senses and fill them out. One thing you will not have missed is the rise of right-wing demagogy in the internet and talk radio. These are cooling media that allow for greater participation; but this participation is as a kind of reflective surface in an echo chamber. Slanders become rumours and rumours become facts, as host and audience goad each other.
This can create false notions that are very difficult to dispel. An example: after the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes the Metropolitan Police put out a number of statements that simply weren’t true: he jumped the barrier, he was wearing a suspicious device, he challenged the police, he looked like Hussein Osman, etc. These claims were recycled through public forums and consequently longer in people’s minds even after they were disproved.
What is ideology, the medium itself; hot or cool? As far as the question is relevant I would suggest it is a cool medium, participatory. For example: The Conservative is a key outlet for bourgeois ideology. But the party cannot win general elections on the vote of its social base, the bourgeoisie, alone. There is a Conservative Party for big capitalists, but there is also one for small business people, there is even a party for a minority of conservative workers. This can only be achieved by incorportating the concerns, the points of view of other groups into the broader bourgeois perspective of the Tories.
The point here is not to suggest hot, cold or cooling media are better, worse, beneficial or pernicious, but to understand them so we are not taken by surprise by their effects.
