If the university is a medium, is it a hot medium or a cool one?
Whether a medium is “hot” or “cool” was a key element of early McLuhan; the concept is presented in chapter 2 of Understanding Media (McLuhan 1964) and developed further in the one that followed. “A hot medium extends a single sense in ‘high definition,'” he explains, where high definition means that the medium is “well filled with data” (p. 36). In contrast, a cool medium is low definition, providing relatively meager amounts of information and requiring receivers to fill in the gaps for themselves. Radio is hot, television is cool. Telephones, movies, the alphabet, paper, money, the wheel–these are all hot. Cartoons, hieroglyphics, ideograms, stone monuments, handwritten manuscripts, the detective story–these are cool.
Hot media are usually space-binding; they are expansive and permit connection. They speed things up. Cool media are often time-binding; they are durable and facilitate memory. Hot technologies are disruptive; they detribalize societies, enabling specialization and fragmentation. Cool media retribalize, ensuring involvement.
It seems that the temperature of a medium depends not only on its technical character, but also upon its social and economic ordering. This can shift over time with the historical articulation of its adoption. “The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, creating extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly. But the typical reversal occurred when extremes of monopoly brought back the corporation . . . The hotting-up of the medium of writing to repeatable print intensity led to nationalism and the religious wars of the sixteenth century” (p. 37).
So is the university a cool medium? It’s certainly possible to see it as time-binding, connecting generations of alumni to the institution and serving in its physical form as a memorial to all who have passed through its gates. The way that universities “tribalize” is easy to see. But is it “low definition” in McLuhan’s sense? Arguably so–what it means almost certainly depends on how one approaches it, as student, faculty, staff member, administrator, trustee, or outsider. And even within those categories, the individual has to work to “fill in the gaps” of what the university is trying to convey to them, largely because of the sheer number of connections and opportunities that campus life affords.
References
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York, NAL Penguin, 1964.