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I am not a big fan of Marshall McLuhan. I do not find his insights to be especially helpful. But that could be my lack of imagination rather than any fault of MM’s. After all Tom Wolfe and Woody Allen, two undoubted geniuses, insist that McLuhan was the “most important thinker since Freud”.

So what do I know?

But consider this:

McLuhan defines a hot medium (radio, print, movies) as one that saturates a single sense with information. Hot media, he argues reduce the need to participate in the medium’s experience. By contrast, the information density of a “cool” medium (television, comic books, telephone) is lower, requiring us to “fill in the blanks” and participate actively in the medium’s experience.

So televison, according to McLuhan is a cool medium which demands a high degree of participation from the audience. But the television we know is loved precisely because it demands nothing - it encourages passivity.

Even if McLuhan is right about the intrinsic nature of televison, his insights do not help us (me anyway) understand the social significance of the media we use.

The whole concept of defining media by temperature seems somewhat arbitrary. If movies are hot and television is cool are home theaters luke warm? Do high-fidelity digital speaker phones turn telephones from a cool to a hot medium?

Rather than temperature I think we might more profitably categorize media according to its weight.

The weight of media can be equated to price. A price where the currency we are trading is not dollar bills - but our time and attention. Media is becoming heavier, and we are forced to ration our consumption.

Back in the fifties and sixties when McLuhan was writing some media was almost light as air. Car radio for instance - you could either turn it on or leave it off. But there was nothing else (at least no other source of media) competing for our attention - therefore very little opportunity cost involved in listening to a radio show in the car.

There is no weightless media today. Every piece of media we consume has to fight for prominence, and the more of our attention it demands - the tougher the fight.

As content producers the ideal solution is to ensure that our content is so compelling that no-one cares about the price. Don’t build Fords and Toyotas - build Bentleys and Ferraris.

In the real world that solution is not always feasible - particularly when we are producing information oriented media rather than entertainment.

As the media market matures and consumer behavior is increasingly rationalized so the lighter a piece of media the more readily it will be consumed.

So how to make media lighter?

It must be easy to consume. Like finger food. Teenagers will happily spend hours watching 2-3 minute videos because they get to choose each morsel, juts like grazing at a buffet table. Interestingly McLuhan’s insights with regard to the participatory nature of TV apply more readily to web video than they ever did to broadcast TV.

It must be convenient. No waiting, no schedules, no disruptive advertising. Contextual advertising is fine - we’ve all learned to ignore it.

It must provide good value. It must not demand more attention than it is worth. Don’t expect an audience to sit through a five minute video to get 20 seconds of information.

It must be compelling. Newspapers and TV news shows have created rituals that have very little to do with imparting worthwhile information. Traditionally newspapers have the same number of pages, and newscasts will run the same amount of time irrespective of how little news there is. The whole 24 hour news cycle is a fiction invented for the covenience of news moguls. They have the same amount of advertising every day so they need the same amount of news. As news moves to the web these rituals are being destroyed.

The web is transforming viewers from donkeys into tigers. They are no longer prepared to eat whatever is put in front of them.

[BONUS LINK] McLuhan: “Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one“. So a movie would seem to allow for no participation at all. What would McLuhan have made of this:

“Sicko started; the stereotypical Texas guy sat down behind me and never stopped talking. He talked through the entire movie… and I listened. The first ten to twenty minutes of the film he spent badmouthing Moore to his wife and snorting in disgust whenever MM went into one of his trademark monologues. But as the movie wore on his protestations became quieter, less enthusiastic. Somewhere along the way, maybe at the half way point, right before my ears, Sicko changed this man’s mind.” Sicko spurs audiences into action from cinemablend.com

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