Text is not Dead

Check out this video with McLuhan’s narration on the topic of television.

I started thinking about what Colin wrote about snapshot thinking. In this current digital age, people have little choice but to get only a snapshot of the news. David Grimshaw wrote about information overload (and, Dan, I think you’ll appreciate this):

The term “information overload” has its roots in the context of computer-mediated communications … Lest one is tempted to think of information overload as a new problem, let us recall the words of T. S. Eliot (1934), “where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”Eliot reminds us that turning information into knowledge is not easy and is far from automatic … It is important to understand the process by which data is or can be transformed into knowledge.

It’s impossible to process all of the information out there, and we have been reduced to trusting the very machine that has overwhelmed us with serving us only the important news. And, what’s important is typically judged by its popularity. When has the opinion of the general population been trustworthy. Is that wise?

Just how much control does the internet have over society? We know it is the source and sometimes the only source of news and information. Will we ever get back control? Will we ever actually make choices about information without the influence of the almighty computer? As I get close to the end of this semester, I have been asking myself these questions. And, I’ve found that, to an extent, I agree with the way Mark Laporta, a blogger, puts it:

Because thanks to search technology, we have seen the Internet — and realized it is us. When it’s all said and done, what we “mean” can only be grasped after a lifetime of experience in the wetware of everyday human existence. That’s still the most effective aggregator of the human wish list.

The ideal is balance, but is there any real way to achieve that? Can we move past seeing things in snapshots?

Should we be nervous? That is one of my questions as I consider the significant power of the internet in our lives. In thinking about the notion that artists are more sensitive to shifts in culture, especially when it comes to media, I can’t help but ponder Terminator, I Robot, Minority Report, and even that flop of a film with poor Sandra Bullock, The Net. All of the stories behind these films show a world taken over by the machines, and that world is scary and out of control. I think humans have always been at least a bit dubious of machines, computers, and the internet. I remember when people were reluctant to begin using debit cards. In response to the internet’s growing power, people have decided to make it friendly, by making it fun. Fun things are innocuous. When Google has a picture on its homepage or even just it’s colorful letters, how can one be doubtful about using it? The biggest shift in making it fun has been social media, which at first started out as a form of entertainment and now acts as a necessary tool for connections. Whether we should be watchful of the growing internet, no one is willing to disconnect from it. We have acquiesced. It might be taking over the world, but we’re fairly convinced that the world is a better place for it.

As I read Marshall Mcluhan’s theory of hot and cold media, two things came to mind: the idea was brilliant for its time, and in spite of the simplicity and intelligence of the idea, it is far too absolute for the medium we use most today, the internet. Or is it still accurate? If one thinks of the internet as a stage upon which different kinds of medium play, perhaps the absolute notion of hot and cold still applies.

According to McLuhan, cold media requires more participation from the user than hot media. Text on website would be cold, while video would be hot. Therefore can be thought of as more of a platform than a medium itself. If the internet is a medium, then Scott Rosenberg explains it is both:

Where would the Internet fall on McLuhan’s temperature meter? It remains almost exclusively a medium that transmits and reproduces vast quantities of text at high speeds. McLuhan interpreted the evolution of writing from ideograms and stone tablets to alphabetic characters and print reproduction as a “hotting up” “to repeatable print intensity.” By that standard, the Net is boiling.

On the other hand, its functional characteristics match those McLuhan identified as cool. There’s no question that the Internet is among the most participatory media ever invented, like the cool telephone. And its cultural patterns — with its oral-tradition-style transmission of myth and its collective anarchy — match those of McLuhan’s tribal global village.

Somehow the Net is both hot and cold at once. Maybe that’s just a function of how broad and easily manipulated McLuhan’s categories are. But maybe there’s a valuable insight here into why it is that certain media — like the Internet and talk radio — have been able to vault to prominence so quickly and powerfully.

But if something is both; is it really either one? Here’s what Rosenberg says:

When you mix water from the hot and cold faucets in your sink, your hands may first feel the extremes of the separate streams. After a while, though, all the water just feels lukewarm.

McLuhan would, I think, have found the Internet thoroughly fascinating but ultimately — like any electronic medium — too powerful, too addictive and too pervasive for comfort. He might have had to revise his spectrum a bit to accommodate it, too.

Hot media, cold media — and now lukewarm media. First they fill up one of your senses to the brim; then they invite you to dive in. First they run hot and cold; then you don’t feel them at all.

While absolutes such as McLuhan’s can apply to many different types of medium for many, many years. I do believe the internet is one that doesn’t fit within his mold. How could it? But when McLuhan’s theories are so accepted and studied- as well they should be- how can the internet be understood? McLuhan surely did write the book on “Understanding Media,” but I’m not sure anyone has conquered understanding the internet.