Why McLuhan's still hot and cool.

"I was struck by one notion, namely that media subtly and
incontrovertibly shape the ways in which we perceive the world around
us."

IN GRAD SCHOOL, I noticed that the professor conducting a communications seminar had notes that were yellowed and crumbling with age. As he turned page after page, dry flecks of paper dislodged themselves and fluttered to the floor. At that moment I vowed never to let my teaching become as desiccated as my professor's lectures.

Attempting to look interested in what should have been an involving seminar on communications theory, I allowed my attention to dissolve back to the defining moment that led me to pursue a graduate degree in Communications. This occurred while I was sitting in Al's Barbershop one Saturday morning in 1964. I was reading a scandalous book that was destined to change my perspective on life forever. It was called Understanding Media, written by the provocative rogue professor Marshall McLuhan. Even though much of what McLuhan had to say was being academically repudiated, I was struck by one notion, namely that media subtly and incontrovertibly shape the ways in which we perceive the world around us. Suddenly, I realized how and why television was a medium that elicited in-depth participation. It helped to explain the cool charismatic attraction of John F. Kennedy over the heated personality of Richard Nixon.

McLuhan's probes have embedded themselves in me and I have enjoyed this non-linear approach to understanding media for more than four decades. As the coordinator for a community college's journalism and Web publishing programs, I have attempted to convey the excitement and insight that McLuhan made available to me in all my courses, particularly in the core course, Introduction to Mass Communications.

During the Spring 2004 semester, I decided to use Understanding Media as the exclusive text for the introductory course rather than require any one of the more than 30 expensive, colorized texts that publishers are eager to foist onto financially strapped college students. Deeply interested in the interrelationship between culture and technology, I wanted to pay particular attention to how new or enhanced technologies alter and shape our educational environment. I wanted my students not only to explore McLuhan's probes, but also to extend and apply these probes to modern times. I was eager to see just how McLuhan's probes would hold up when translated into our braver, newer media-saturated world.

Even though many of McLuhan's references seemed dated, I was pleased at my students' willingness to understand the ideas behind hot and cool media, the concept of media as extensions of our senses, the notion that the medium is the message, and even the "principle of numbness [that] comes into play with electronic technology" ("The Gadget Lover" p.47).

During class discussions, several ideas emerged. Most students readily understood the concept of hot and cool media when deciphering MuLuhan's statement that "Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue" ("Media Hot and Cold" p.23). They applied this idea to a discussion of home theatre systems (i.e., big screen, rectangular HDTV plasma televisions with multi-speaker surround sound amplifiers), and pointed out how the very name of the new medium, High Definition TV, had a striking similarity to McLuhan's observation that "A hot medium is one that extends a single sense in 'high definition.' High definition is the state of being well filled with data" ("Media Hot and Cold" p.22). With HDTV, they postulated, there is a conversion from what once was a cool medium to what is now an "all inclusive" or hot medium. This conversion necessitated a "room change" in many homes, from a living room, a place designed for families to gather and interact, into a media room, where family members are transformed into separate, near anonymous members of an audience.

In addition, students were quick to recognize how e-mail has reshaped our communications, seemingly diminishing the amount of hard copy while seriously eroding our ability to spell. Even the newly installed Smart Board in our class was looked upon as a cross between a portal for in-depth, interactive information and a big screen GameCube.

Dramatizing "the power of radio to involve people in depth" ("Radio: The Tribal Drum" p.298), I played a CD of the old time radio program "The Shadow." This show is a perfect example of radio's ability to affect "people intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener" ("Radio: The Tribal Drum" p.299). In response to this experience, one student wrote: "What got me the most was that I soon realized that television, movies, or what-have-you, that involve pictures, kinda' simplifies what our minds are capable of. The freedom we have in casting our own 'mental' characters is endless. I was actually amazed at how much I enjoyed just listening for once."

For final projects, students were challenged to devise probes of their own, demonstrating how media shape the ways in which we perceive reality. What follows are a sample of their responses.

The Woodstock Concert of 1969, attended by several students' parents, was characterized as a tribal event, celebrating what McLuhan termed the "global village" ("Reversal of the Overheated Medium" p.34). Several students pointed out how and why cell phones, once a fashion statement, were now unquestionably necessary accessories. The need to stay connected was paramount to the disturbing chirps that interrupt dining, movies, dramatic productions, classes, and even conferences, to name only a few of the more obvious venues. Further more, Moblogging was taken for granted as the logical, and for most a necessary, extension of the eye, ear, and mouth.

A prospective music business major noted that the Internet has changed the music industry by rendering the record store practically obsolete. Analyzing how and why Marilyn Monroe was the embodiment of a media-produced icon, a student who also moonlights as a local DJ cited McLuhan's statement that, "Both monocle and camera tend to turn people into things, and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise" ("The Photograph: The Brothel-without-Walls" p. 189).

It has been more than 40 years since McLuhan endured the censure of academics and, thanks to TV's "Laugh In" and Woody Allen's "Annie Hall," enjoyed a good deal of general popularity. Coincidentally, it has been more than 40 years since Al's Barbershop closed its neighborhood doors. Nevertheless, the idea that "the medium is the message"--a concept pioneered decades earlier than McLuhan by his mentor Harold Innis in his 1951 work The Bias of Communication and also outlined in Lewis Mumford's 1934 magnum opus Technics and Civilization--rings true for a brave new generation of communications savvy students.

The importance of this line of inquiry is best expressed in McLuhan's own words: "to understand many media, the conflicts from which they spring, and the even greater conflicts to which they give rise, holds out the promise of reducing these conflicts by an increase of human autonomy." ("Hybrid Energy," Les Liasions Dangereuses, p.51)

REFERENCE

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1964.

GARY MIELO*

* Gary Mielo is an Associate Professor of English and Journalism and the Coordinator for Journalism and Web Publishing Programs at Sussex County Community College in Northwest New Jersey. His E-prime article, "Why Digital Clocks Fail," was published in the Spring 1995 issue of ETC.