Which of the following are considered hot media? A. Telephone B. Television C.…

Concept

Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media (1964), sorts every medium on two linked properties: its definition and the participation it demands. Definition is the density of data a medium delivers to a single sense. Participation is how much the audience must supply from itself to complete the message.

A hot medium is high in definition: it fills one sense with dense, complete data, so it leaves little for the audience to fill in, and participation is low. A cool medium is low in definition: it delivers sparse, gappy data, so the audience must work to complete it, and participation is high. The classification follows from the technical form of the medium, not from its content, its popularity, or how modern it is.

Application

Apply the two-part test — definition first, then the participation that follows from it — to each medium named in the list.

1. Telephone. It delivers a thin, narrow-band stream of sound through a small earpiece, and the listener must continually reconstruct tone, emphasis and meaning from that sparse signal. Low definition, high participation, so McLuhan classes the telephone as cool.

2. Television. In McLuhan’s account the television picture is a scanned mosaic of light points that the viewer’s eye and mind must continuously assemble into an image. Low definition, high participation, so television is cool.

3. Radio. It pours a full, continuous sound field into the ear and nothing else, saturating that one sense with data. High definition, low participation, so radio is hot.

4. Cinema. It projects a dense sequence of photographic frames onto a large screen at a rate that gives the eye a complete, saturated image. High definition, low participation, so cinema is hot.

5. Photographs. A photograph fixes a complete visual record in one frame and leaves nothing for the viewer to fill in — which is exactly why McLuhan contrasts it with the cartoon, whose few outlines the viewer must complete. High definition, low participation, so the photograph is hot.

Cross-check

Reading the two properties across the whole list makes the split explicit.

A second check comes from McLuhan’s own contrasting pairs, in which each hot medium is set against a cool counterpart: radio against the telephone, the movie against television, and the photograph against the cartoon. The hot member of each pair is radio, cinema and the photograph.

The hot media in the list are therefore C. Radio, D. Cinema and E. Photographs, so the required combination is C, D, E only.