Staying cool in a hot media environment

McLuhan in an age of social media

“The medium is the message,” wrote media studies scholar, Marshall McLuhan. If there’s one word that captures the message of the medium we communicate on today—social media, Telegram groups, and podcasts—it’s often intolerance. There are many words and many messages, of course, but this one seems to surface often.

Part of the reason is speed. How we receive and ingest information (and news) is too fast to consider the depth of reporting.

News consumption took time for most of time. Even in the eighties, my parents were militaristic about time. They woke me up at 6 am even though I didn’t have to leave for school until 8 am. I stumbled into the kitchen, Howard Stern and Don Imus playing on AM radio, the day’s newspaper on the table. I’d scroll through the sports section and comics; as I grew older, thumb through the news.

The newspaper, the very medium in which I started my career, was slow: you’d have to wait a day to learn about yesterday’s news, or listen to the slightly faster medium of radio. You read a story or hear a news clip and have a reaction. Both the amount of news you could consume and the speed with which you could take it in, share, and discuss it with peers was slow. And because the only real outlet was with peers—I didn’t really discuss issues with my family until later, and even then, my family is mostly apolitical—you would witness their reaction in real-time.

McLuhan had another categorization for media. He defined “hot” media as rich in sensory data. Photographs and radio are hot. “Cool” media provide less sensory data, so you have to participate more. For example, the telephone is cool because it requires that you engage with the information, whereas most hot media provides most if not all of the story.

Television was labeled as cool due to the resolution and pixelation that had to be completed by our brains, whereas film was higher resolution and more immersive, though those distinctions are largely gone today. Now it delivers roughly the same information (news and movies) as hot media. What interests me is his realization that there are different levels of participation depending on the medium in which you’re sharing or acquiring information.

You probably understand where this is going.

We exist in a participatory media environment, which has benefits and drawbacks. On one level, a lot of people who call themselves journalists are anything but—looking at you, Chaya Raichik (among others). On another, the gatekeeping institutions of journalism have been upended by truly stupendous independent reporting and startup newsrooms, like Defector, 404 Media, and Hell Gate.

New Yorker columnist Jay Caspian Kang discussed this media evolution on Friday, citing one of my favorite media studies books, Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman. Kang grapples with the public view of the “mods,” in this case the gatekeeping institutions of media, like the New Yorker.

Today, we live with the irony that the intense pitch and total saturation of political conversation in every part of our lives—simply pick up your phone and rejoin the fray—create the illusion that important ideas are right on the verge of being actualized or rejected. But the form of that political discourse—millions of little arguments—is actually what makes it impossible to process and follow what should be an evolving and responsive conversation. We mistake volume for weight; how could there be so many posts about something with no acknowledgment from the people in charge? Don’t they see how many of us are expressing our anger? These questions elicit despair, because the poster believes that no amount of dissent will actually be heard. And when that happens, in any forum, the posters blame the mods.

This disparity between citizen and expert lives at the heart of modern media, and often fuels distrust in institutions and experts. Yet there’s no either/or in this argument, which makes it extremely difficult to assess and decide who to listen to and trust. Then you have to weigh reference points: someone might have very good things to say about one topic while you’re diametrically opposed to them on another. Knowing the difference between agreement and dissension is important; its loss makes it challenging to engage in healthy critical thinking.