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Theories of Cybersociety 71
Table 3.2 Features and types of hot and cool mediums
Hot mediums Cool mediums
Features (McLuhan, Low participation High participation
1964: 31–3) Extends one single
sense
High definition Low definition
A large amount of Small amount of
information information
Need to be completed by
the audience
Tend to ovetake cool Tend to be supplanted and
mediums remade by hot mediums
Tend to be mechanical,
repetitive, uniform
Examples (McLuhan, Radio Telephone
1964: 31–2) Cinema Television
Photograph Cartoon
Speech
Phonetic alphabet Hieroglyphic and
ideogrammatic written
characters
Print Monastic and clerical
script
Paper Stone
Lecture Seminar
Book Dialogue
Examples (McLuhan, Past mechanical times The contemporary TV age
1964: 36) Developed countries Underdeveloped countries

TV’ age is cool (36). Finally, McLuhan describes how cool mediums ‘need
to be completed by an audience’. However, the actual instances of cool
mediums he specifies – telephone, cartoon, speech (if taken as face-to-face),
the interactive seminar and dialogue – don’t actually have an ‘audience’,
whereas the hot mediums of radio, cinema, print and lectures do.
For McLuhan’s schema to have coherence, television should be
placed in the category of a hot medium. If this were done, his account would
make sense in terms of the first and second media age – corresponding to
what he calls the mechanical age versus cybernation. I point this out, not
in order to fit everything into the dualism that this distinction purveys,
but because McLuhan himself is inconsistent.
A final problem is the way the hot/cool distinction is over-extended
to include all manner of objects, past and present societies, stone and
paper, phonetics and writing, so much so that it dilutes itself by way of
a generalized and generalizing dualistic vitalism.
However, in differentiating between hot and cool media according
to definition and information, different technologies are clustered in a