I'm afraid I'm That Annoying Grad Student.

You know - the one that dominates the conversation, contradicting the professor and dismissing the premise of the author's argument that's being discussed. I usually hold back, but last night, it was too familiar a topic - Marshall McLuhan.

Some things to keep in mind:

1) I've had a bit of time to think about this stuff. Understanding Media was assigned reading in one of my freshman seminars back in 1991. More generally, any undergraduate Communications or Rhetoric class (of which I took more than my fair share) is going to be peppered with references to McLuhan. And then there's the whole techno-shamanistic bent that has been getting me off for years, since.

2) One thing that always amused my undergrad professors is that I never swallowed wholesale the philosophies we studied. Instead, I preferred to explicitly recognize the rhetoric of extremes (used by EVERY philosopher to make a point), and take the more instructive/useful parts of the readings. This was in direct contrast to the other students in my class who engaged in the kind of "close-reading" that's really more akin to the rabbit-hole exegesis practiced by religious thinkers who use God to justify God.

So, when we started talking about McLuhan's whole "hot" vs. "cold" media, and people were getting hung up on his definition of television as the ultimate particpatory medium, I had to interrupt.

"Hot vs. Cold" is nothing more than a soundbyte gone awry. It has nothing to do with pixellated images, despite what he says.

Let's put this in historical context. The only reason he lauds television as the ultimate participatory medium is that he's trying to insert himself squarely in the middle of one of the main popular debates of the 1960s - the effect and potential of television (Those damn kids and their tv!). This was the first generation that grew up in front of the set.

It's more useful to look at media in terms of their participatory levels, not in terms of "hot" or "cold." McLuhan's terms get you no where.

A medium that's largely non-participatory is not "bad." It's not "good." It simply "is." The best way to approach study of this quality is to see how it is used.