A cartoon is a medium of:

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan classified every communication medium along a scale of “definition” — the completeness of sensory/data information it supplies. A “hot” medium is high in definition: it delivers dense, complete data and therefore demands low participation from the audience to fill in gaps (for example, a photograph, radio, or film). A “cool” medium is low in definition: it delivers sparse, incomplete data and therefore demands high audience participation to complete the meaning (for example, a telephone, a cartoon, television, or a seminar).

A cartoon is a simplified, sketch-like line drawing that omits most visual detail — shading, texture, depth, and photographic realism are all absent. Because so little information is actually supplied on the page, the viewer's mind must supply the missing detail to perceive the image as a whole. This sparse, gap-filled information density is exactly what McLuhan meant by low definition, so a cartoon is classified as a low-definition (cool) medium.

This checks out against McLuhan's paired example: a photograph is the high-definition counterpart he cites — it reproduces a scene with full tonal and textural completeness, leaving the viewer almost nothing to fill in, which is why he calls it “hot”. The cartoon sits at the opposite end of that same definition scale, confirming its low-definition classification independently of the specific option wording.

• High definition describes media that supply complete, information-rich data (for example, a photograph) — the opposite of a cartoon's sparse line art, so it does not fit.

• Neutral definition is not a recognised point on McLuhan's definition scale at all; the scale only runs from high (hot) to low (cool), with no neutral midpoint category.

• Negative definition is likewise not a term used in this classification; “definition” in this theory measures completeness of data, never a positive/negative polarity.