Rather, television as a medium contains the totality of its effect on society. In this way, McLuhan argues, a light emitting device “creates an environment by its mere presence.” He goes even further, arguing that the content of television (as in the show it aired) does not really matter. It emits light waves however, the light waves in themselves carry no information or message until they reach another medium, such as a solid surface. The light bulb is itself a glass enclosure with a filament that reacts to electricity that flows from an outlet. Next, McLuhan provides the light bulb as an extreme example of a device that can be interpreted as a medium with absolutely no semantic content. Cold media are easier to learn from because they consist of this more social, participatory, function.
Curiously, despite presenting denser information, hot media are harder to learn from since they invite less participation, which produces recursive feedback. For example, the cartoon and television program are both cold media because the totality of the information they present is entangled in a time-lapse made up of countless frames (which were almost always in lower definition than professional photography at McLuhan’s time of writing). They require their audience’s active interpretation in order to be legible as intended. In contrast, cold media extend physical capacities but do so by reducing the density of information. Moreover, they are relatively unambiguous from an objective point of view, since the totality of information they present does not mutate.
In this category, he includes images and text, since they are dense with visual data processed by the eyes.
The first explicates a distinction between what he calls “hot media” and “cold media.” Hot media represent extensions of our physical capacities, refining or enriching them with a high density of information. McLuhan splits the book into two main sections. He exhorts other design theorists and public thinkers to focus on these transmission modes rather than what people might use them to say since the medium delimits a priori what it is possible to say. Much of McLuhan’s book is centered on his most famous assertion that “the medium is the message” that is, the structure of the delivery system transmitting any given content is more important than the content itself. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) by media theorist and public intellectual Marshall McLuhan was a major work that helped inaugurate the field of New Media, which seeks to create ways of linking visual, aural, and functional design with other arts and sciences to reshape theory and public life.
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