January 3, 2001
-
I’m reading a great compilation of the seminal writings of prescient media guru Marshall McLuhan, entitled Essential McLuhan. McLuhan’s ingenious insights stem from his recognition that different media (e.g. an oral myth, a dry narrative newspaper, radio, television, etc.) define a context that affects the reader/viewer/listener irregardless of the content of the message. Immortalized in the expression “The medium is the messsage,” this insight led McLuhan to distinguish between “hot” media like radio and cinema that have more information and appeal to fewer of the reader’s senses, and “cool” media like the telephone and cartoons that are less full of information and appeal to many of the reader’s senses.
While I’m still reading and processing this book, it does seem to serve as an effective partial substitue for the ideas in McLuhan’s seminal books (e.g. The Global Village, Understanding Media, and The Gutenberg Galaxy). It also has additional material (e.g. McLuhan’s Playboy Magazine interview) that would be impossible to find elsewhere.
I haven’t got far, but I thought I would comment on the following quote in the introduction by the collection’s editors, the following quote appears:
When you begin a book which is something relatively new, you get first of all a “what nonsense” reaction and then the “many brilliant insights, but of course all wrong” reaction, then finally the “we knew it all along” reaction.
This editors used this quote to refer to the reaction to McLuhan’s writings, which followed much the same course.
I found this quote interesting for different reason. Namely, this three-stage process exactly corresponds to my mood whenever I attempt to write an insightful piece of original analysis (in my job as a Wall Street analyst):
1. Nonsense. I get tremendously confused during this stage of my writing, and feel that nothing makes sense (and it never will). Hopelessness reigns!
2. Insightful, but all wrong. I then get tremendously excited when I complete small bits of analysis that “work” and start writing it up in a coherent piece.
3. Knew it all along. Without exception, whenever I’m done writing the piece and read it for the first time, I think, “Egads, I just spent 100 hours writing something that is completely obvious and trivial, and why would anyone read this? I can’t believe I wasted my time!”
This last feeling only goes away when I get excited feedback from someone who has struggled with the problem I am analyzing. Ironically, I find that when a newbie to a particular subject reads an original essay, he or she tends to immediately jump to the “knew it all along” category. In my experience, it’s the reader who has struggled with that problem who is most apt to think, “Gee, I’ve thought about this problem for a long time, and not come up with a solution, and the author’s ideas offer a solution to this, and isn’t that cool!
Comments (3)
I may have to try that book…
Hey Bob. Sounds like a cool book. I didn’t understand this part of your summary (bold emphasize the part I didn’t get):
“…led McLuhan to distinguish between “hot” media like radio and cinema that have more information and appeal to fewer of the reader’s senses, and “cool” media like the telephone and cartoons that are less full of information and appeal to many of the reader’s senses. “
Is he implying that information overload across a limited number of senses (such as sight in the case of a movie) dulls the imagination’s ability to construct worlds across all senses? This is an interesting observation, but I think the truth of this statement depends heavily on the sensory preferences of the individual: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc.
in part continuation of Brendan’s comment because there is no answer provided: does “hot” mean something that engages less of the audience’s senses because it requires less imagination to conjure up a “picture” while “cold” mean something that requires the audience to engage more of his senses to complete a “picture”? also, it’s not just the sensory preferences of the individual that creates the context: which medium is most used and “conventional” for conveying information? i suspect that in an advanced computer age, reading news from a screen will affect people the same way as reading news from newspaper affects them now because people would have gotten used to the medium.
btw, is this where you read about semiotics? to add to McLuhan’s writing (and i am not sure that he has already written about this because i have yet to read the book), it’s not just the medium or the word/sign that affects the audience. it is the presentation of the sign. for example, if my post were written in Comic Sans Serif font, it would evoke an entirely different context than if it were written in Times New Roman.
interesting blog.