Hot and Cool Media

What is “Hot” and “Cool” media?

“As applied to communications, the terms “hot” and “cool,” were first introduced by the controversial culture maven and media theorist H. Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980).”

Source: http://condor.depaul.edu/~dsimpson/pers/hot-cool.html

 media

Image from: http://condor.depaul.edu/~dsimpson/pers/hot-cool.html

Hot media provides complete involvement without considerable stimulus. For example, print occupies visual space, uses visual senses, but can immerse its reader. Hot media favors analytical precision, quantitative analysis and sequential ordering, as they are usually sequential, linear and logical. They emphasize one sense (for example, of sight or sound) over the others. Hot media also include radio, film, lecture and photography.

 media

Image from: http://condor.depaul.edu/~dsimpson/pers/hot-cool.html

Cool media provides little involvement with substantial stimulus. They require more active participation on the part of the user, including the perception of abstract patterning and simultaneous comprehension of all parts. According to McLuhan “cool media” includes television, seminar and cartoons. He describes the term “cool media” as emerging from jazz and popular music.

Advertisement

1 Response so far »


Comment RSS · TrackBack URI

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.