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40 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
Today, McLuhan’s schema as applied to the Internet might look like the
following:

THE INTERNET
PRINT IMAGE
WRITTEN WORD ICON
SPEECH VISUAL COMMUNICATION
These layers of technological worlds, past and present, intensify the work
of processing meaning which confronts consumers immersed in the
different mediums. This process work becomes heightened to the point
where we have to be educated and inducted into it as increasingly infor-
mation has to be produced by the audience or the receiver.
McLuhan’s primary distinction that is relevant here is that between
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‘hot’ and ‘cool’ mediums. Hot mediums like radio and cinema circulate
a large amount of information, bombarding the viewer or listener.
Relatively little is required in order to interpret them. Cool mediums, on
the other hand, presuppose interaction. McLuhan’s assumption is that in
hot mediums there is an overdose of information, and there is little need
for interactivity, for ‘active’ participants, or for participation at all.
Later in Understanding Media McLuhan begins to describe the demise
of mechanical media like print in making way for technologies of
‘automation’ like radio and television as part of what he calls the ‘cyber-
nation’ transformation of modern society. It is the electronic instantaneity
of radio and TV which consolidates the hegemony of mass media over
older mechanical technologies of reproduction.

Automation brings in real ‘mass production’, not in terms of size, but of an
instant inclusive embrace. Such is also the character of ‘mass media’. They
are an indication, not of the size of their audiences, but of the fact that every-
body becomes involved in them at the same time. (McLuhan, 1994: 372)
In other words, the significant property of broadcast which McLuhan
zeros in on is its ‘live’ character. Here it is the fact that a broadcast com-
munication is live for the audience, rather than live at the point of produc-
tion. The content of the transmission could have been prepared earlier
or at the same time as the audience is consuming it. However, McLuhan
is, of course, not interested in the content, but in the way the audience is
merely a constituted reflex of the medium itself. Insofar as the media
achieve cybernation, ‘the consumer’ of a message also ‘becomes producer
in the automation circuit, quite as much as the reader of the mosaic tele-
graph press makes his own news, or just is his own news’ (McLuhan,
1994: 372). The value of McLuhan’s analysis here is that he suggests that
an electronic assembly or ‘virtual’ assembly does not have to be dialogical
or equal, or even have ‘high participation’, in order to guarantee mutual
presence. Even if the vast majority of ‘participants’ in a medium are