For those who have read any of Marshall McLuhan’s book or have heard of him, hard-to-read is an inevitable feature of his text; and it is not because of being pretentious, rather the opposite, for that the text is understandable but the structure is confusing. As Mark Federman puts it in On Reading McLuhan:
“McLuhan’s work is mosaic. It cannot be understood as a linear construction, beginning at the beginning and proceeding through the middle to the end. He presents no linear argument, no consistently built case of evidence, yet his body of work is remarkably consistent, except when it’s not. His evidence is clearly presented, except when it’s obscure. His arguments and examples are easily caught, mainly because they are reiterated throughout all his works — if you miss it the first, second, third or seventh times through, you’re sure to catch it the tenth or fifteenth or twentieth time you see it. Reading McLuhan is an exercise in pattern recognition, and once you see the patterns that emerge from the McLuhan mosaic, you will never, ever, be able not to see them — anywhere and everywhere.” [1]
As soon as the pattern emerges, pieces of the puzzle are recognizable. In a part of this puzzle, McLuhan brings up the terms Hot and Cool medium, where neither the matter of temperature nor sexiness is meant. It is in fact, a concept, a measure of distinction between media within his framework. He defines Hot and Cool medium as such:
“A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in “high definition”. High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, “high definition” A cartoon is “low definition,” simply because vary little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.” [2]
He tries to illustrate a gradient, a measure of comparison for medium; a measure which is precise and imprecise at the same time. This way of framing the concept in fact, groups most of the theorists and philosophers together where they all discuss a controversial topic way ahead of their time and leaves it open-ended. Foucault did the same in his essay on Heterotopia, Other Spaces, for instance, where he defined an obscure notion called Heterotopia as a meter; in this case, although the concept is abstract in nature, it divides the spaces in Heterotopic and Non-heterotopic at the end. Kenneth E. Boulding in his article The Medium and The Message simplifies the idea of Hot and Cool media as:
“Media can be divided into “hot” media, which do not involve much participation on the part of the recipient, and “cool” media, in which the process of communication involves a great deal of participation on the part of the recipient.” [3]
But is this notion as simple as he describes it? referring to the gradient feature of McLuhan’s argument, Kenneth E. Boulding continues with defining three dimensions for the exposition of media’s properties including Demandingness (dimension of involvement of the recipient, Range (the ability of the medium to develop a system of feedback from the communicatee to the communicator) and Density (limited information intake because of the capacity of human’s sense organs.)[4] Considering these three elements highlights the gradient feature of McLuhan’s Hot and Cool media in a way that makes it possible to map each medium approximately inside the given boundary. In fact, the position of each medium in this gradient map can only be relatively measured by taking the position of other media into account.
In this regard, if we consider Architecture and Cinema as two media, it seems Cinema is hotter than Architecture because there is less freedom/participation for the audience to change the way they’re going through the storyline of a movie than the experience of perceiving an architectural space. Let’s say in Cinema, the narration is fixed to a certain extent while in Architecture, personal perception of the space is always a matter of importance as a variable; a feature that increases the level of freedom/participation (It’s crucial to clarify McLuhan draws a fine line between TV and Movies to be considered as Hot and Cool Medium respectively; for he believes the matter of participation (demandingness) is lower in former than the latter.). Nigel Coates is on the same wavelength when he discusses the “hotness” of Architecture:
“Although 20th-century Modernist architects would probably have seen architecture as ‘hot’ in McLuhan’s terms, I see it as ‘cool’ in that it is both open to wide interpretation and requires effort on part of the participant. The ‘medium’ of space is open and closed, multivalent and transmutable. Architecture works by association, constantly mirroring and differing from ‘space’ in the mind. Like TV and the internet, architecture should hand the power of experience back to people.” [5]
Corresponding to the flexibility of narration in Architecture, in his book Narrative Architecture, he distinguishes a series of built work driven by narration based on three forms of Binary Narrative, Sequence Narrative and Biotopic Narrative.
Looking at the other side of the coin, Iranian director and Oscar-winner, Asghar Farhadi discussed the “coolness” of Cinema in a recent event, About Architecture with Asghar Farhadi, Oct 2019, Tehran as such:
“By comparing Architecture and Cinema, may seem the effects of Cinema is deeper, more immediate and Architecture is sitting in a corner, more modest. It is generally assumed Cinema and Media having more effects in the long run. But my personal perception is, without valuing any of the two, Architecture is having deeper effects on our life than Cinema and by deeper effects I mean those which remain with us, not easy to forget. In fact, for me, the effect of Architecture on Cinema is in a way that people live in architectural space, they gain something out of it, they shape their lifestyle and then we pick those people and change them into characters of the film. It means in a sense, before we pick those people, they are already affected by Architecture.” [6]
Then Farhadi continues:
“Architecture is an abstract language—if we can call it a language which can be discussed—which means I have my own perception and you have yours when we both are facing with the same architectural space. And we can see this freedom of choice, freedom of understanding in relation with object (the architecture/space) and subject (the audience/people who lives in) like music when everyone has its own feelings/perceptions about it. But in the disciplinary of Cinema, the feeling/perception of those who are watching the film is more or less the same. It means there is a dictatorship in the relation of Film and The Audience.”[7]
Putting aside which media is hotter than the other, the idea of media as extensions of man enables one to think of the term “media” out of its normative scope and by considering the patterns of McLuhan’s point of view, it is also possible to examine the power of each medium. According to McLuhan’s definition media changes into a crucial part of twenty-first century’s disciplinaries as well since each discipline can be a medium itself which leaves us with the question:
What if understanding media as extensions of disciplinaries?
[1] Federman, M., 2000. On Reading McLuhan. McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. http://individual. utoronto. ca/markfederman/OnReadingMcLuhan. pdf.
[2] McLuhan, M., 1994. Media Hot and Cold. In: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man . 1st ed. s.l.:MIT Press, pp. 22-32.
[5] Coates, Nigel. 2012. By Narrative Architecture, 124. 1st.
[6] [7] The Dialogue is translated by Houman Riazi from Persian to English.
You can watch the full video of the event in Persian here:
https://livography.com/memaranmoaser/
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