McLuhan- Luke Warm?

The following is a response to reading McLuhan's theory of Hot and Cold media as found within his 1964 work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Reading McLuhan is like a meandering journey through ADHD territory with so many tangents and a complete preoccupation with comparing hot and cold media in countless immeasurable examples. Ideas are started and yet fail to follow through and his complete over simplification and generalisation of some examples to fit within the hot to cold paradigm is troubling, I refer in this point to the reference about the collapse of Indigenous Australian tribal culture based on axe distribution- unless this use of the word axe is a metaphor of some kind then his assessment of the situation seems to have trimmed down this event to fit within the parameters of his argument. He’s definitely a man of his time, noting his reference to ‘backward’ countries as cool and to ‘us’ (by us I’m assuming he is referring to Westernised developed and more specifically capitalist countries given the political climate during which his study was undertaken- the height of the Cold War during the 1960s).


The central point of his study of hot and cold media seems to be that hot media like movies enhance a single sense (high definition) in this case- vision, indicating that to participate in the media is a passive experience wherein the individual does not need to exert much effort in filling in the gaps on screen. In contrast at the other end of McLuhan’s spectrum is the notion of the Cold media such as a comic book which requires a higher level of participation by the reader in determining and extracting meaning from the media.

However, McLuhan’s assessment of media consumption and in turn his classification of a media as hot or cold disregards what the individual brings to the media, the depth of understanding the individual wishes to take from the media and the content of the media itself (which he seems to believe can be separated and discarded in favour of the type of media). In gaming for example a game such as Minecraft could be classified as a cool example (requiring greater participation from the individual) within what I am sure McLuhan would see as a hot medium (ie: Gaming predominantly provides information to a gamer and enhances a single sense, the visual sense). Yet it is possible to also find a Hot media for example an online facebook ‘game’ such as Farmville which is mind numbingly hot requiring very little individual input with only a single sense enhanced, the visual.

With so many medias now performing a duality of functions and enhancing multiple senses, McLuhen’s Hot to Cold scale seems to, although historiographically important to the study of media, be largely irrelevant as a method of measuring a medium such as Games that contain within it such a diverse range of genres and sub genres that determine participation levels and this is without even considering how the individual chooses to approach and participate in each individual game.