TV: Not so cool anymore
Fast forward to February 2009 and you will experience an all-digital TV environment in the US after more than six decades of analogue broadcasting. When the analogue signal is finally turned off, TV will automatically become a “hot” medium. According to Marshall McLuhan, media can be structured in the “hot” and “cool” buckets depending on their ability to “involve” people. The involvement of people depends mainly on how the technology [not necessarily advanced or otherwise] that enables the medium displays or affect its content. Cinema will always be a hot medium because its technology [film] renders its content in high resolution, allowing for almost no involvement. Analogue TV, on the other hand, is a cool medium because the viewer has to constantly join the dots to digest the content, the low-res nature of TV demands constant closure and that, in McLuhan’s theory, accounts for a high level on involvement.
McLuhan’s Hot and Cool Interview [with Gerald Emanuel Stearn, available here], offers some interesting reflections on this matter in a context not so distant from today’s key issues. After a reflection on the effects [at home] of TV coverage of the Vietnam War, Stearn asks whether shutting down TV would actually end the war, to which McLuhan replies with a statement that deserves further discussion in the light of the upcoming digital TV revamp:
“Oh yes. But there is an alternative: Put hundreds of extra lines on the TV image, set up its visual intensity to a new hot level. This might serve to reverse the whole effect of TV. It might make the TV image photographic, slick, like movies: hot and detached.”
We could translate his point with the assumption that involvement, via a conscious or unconscious effort to [literally] complete the picture, alienates the audience via driving us inward into our own passive universe. This can be contrasted with the effect of hot media, which let us digest the full picture and be critical about it.
In the new era of digital and HDTV there is no need for additional lines, in fact, there are no lines at all, however, the effect [or at least the goal] is still photographic quality, the best resolution possible, a visual representation with an intensity that we haven’t experienced on TV. Whether or not this will have a tangible effect on the impact of the medium in society remains to be seen, almost no “respectable” intellectual believed McLuhan in his time and most people still remain skeptic today. In spite of this, in the past few years we have seen his thinking permeating and being validated by popular culture in unexpected ways, so it doesn’t sound too crazy to take a hard look at our future relationship with TV and its new hot identity.
