Page 113 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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98 Then
extensions? This is the sinister vision that McLuhan finds in Bur-
roughs’s eschatological landscape of organs without bodies and
technologies:
All men are totally involved in the insides of all men. There is
no privacy and no private parts. In a world in which we are all
ingesting and digesting one another there can be no obscenity
or pornography or indecency. Such is the law of electric media
which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of
enclosure.
(McLuhan 1997: 89)
This quotation prefigures Part 2’s discussion of the notion of the
obscene. It is a term Baudrillard uses to address the implosion of social
distance in a manner that directly counters Benjamin’s excessively
optimistic notion of the camera’s explosive power. Part 2 explores in
detail how a similar all-consuming quality is attributed to the
commodity form and it is this combination of the ‘greedy eyes’
nature of cameras and the wider commodity culture that contains it
that devours all previous social forms to create a one-dimensional
commodified mediascape.

‘Hot’ v. ‘Cool’

In contrast to many of the key concepts put forward in Understanding
Media, McLuhan’s division of technical media into hot and cool
appears irrelevant and idiosyncratic. McLuhan’s notion of hot meant
that a medium presents itself as a single sensory stream in high
definition. Examples of this might include radio and film. McLuhan
saw hot media as passive, since they did not require the audience to
supply detail. Cool media in contrast were marked by their low
definition, and presented schematic or minimal data. Television was
the privileged example of the cool. As a low-definition image (as
television was in the 1960s) McLuhan argued that the audience was
actively involved in developing the image, and so it was a more
participatory medium. This coolness on television’s behalf underpins
McLuhan’s assertion that the viewer is the real screen; the television
image is assembled in and by the viewer. Thus the participation
occurs at the level of the medium as technology rather than in terms
of any meaningful level of interactivity with the content itself – this
mirrors Part 2’s treatment of the various modes of pseudo-
interaction promoted in daytime and Reality TV (and even previ-
ously ‘serious’ news programmes).
Understanding individual media

Having explored the key principles of McLuhan’s theory media
theory, it is now time to turn to the analysis of individual media that

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