Week 3- Media by McLuhan The Visually Impaired

According to McLuhan, in the text “Medium is the Message”, the medium shapes and controls human action. To understand the meaning of the medium is the message, McLuhan says “the content of any medium is always another medium”, for example speech is the content of writing and writing is the content of print. For further explanation of the “medium”, the author is describing the electric light as a medium without a content but has a social effect because it allows to create light during nighttime. The content of a medium is the focus that delivers the important information. He gives another example about the media firearm because it is neither good or bad, it is only the message that it gives that determines its value. Also, McLuhan talks about Cubism art as “instant sensory awareness of the whole” which means Cubism a medium that has no message and it is illusionary but is complete as a medium.

In the text “Media Hot and Cold” Mashall McLuhan explains that hot media is a dense media with data such as radio or entertainment (TV). It has a low in participation and is a visual medium. They are hot because since they are visual data, they record the information with the eyes and store it in the mind to have further thoughts about the subject. These media can be found in England and America. It has the effect of hypnosis on the human senses. In the other hand cool media requires less data based but more participating such as the phone because the users must fill in the message. Cold media can be considered to have a lack of image and is not as easy to determine the message through the media.  It is considered as “low definition” in comparison to hot media as “high definition”. Cold media has an hallucination effect on the human senses.