Hot and Cold Mediums - June 27

I’m interested in the relationship that McLuhan points out between the type of medium being used and the level of participation needed to engage with a text. “Any hot medium [Television, radio, photograph] allows of less participation than a cool one [Novel, newspaper, comic strip]” (Mcluhan 23). It seems that in many ways hot mediums have become the more preferred medium in which we access information. Video, Podcasts, and film have become far more popular. Meanwhile many of the cool mediums, forms of print are dying (Newspaper). I have a couple questions concerning this evolution of information mediums:

• Does less or more participation equate with the level of critical engagement a person has with a text?

• What implications this is having or will have on how we think and perceive the world around us.

With high level of participation it seems that there is more of a dialogue happening, in that the communicator is required to provide ample support for their stance and the reader is expected to participate in the evaluation of claim and support. While I believe that this is still true for hot mediums - the depth in which the communicator is required to support claims is not there because the level of participation is not required by the reader. If this is the case, then “. . . authorities of state, the church or the ‘party’, of ‘capital’ or of others (Kress 17) have limited the ways in which we as readers can critically engage with issues that are layered in a way that require an active amount of participation.

I think that this point is evident when looking at the effects social medial (facebook / or twitter) hand on elections across the globe.