Media Hot & Cool - What is Media?

In the last 2 weeks we have looked at a 1950ies synaesthetic concept and, using Prof. McLuhan's mindfigure of "hot and cool media" as an example, examined if metaphoric reflection and aphoristic communication still made sense at all in scientific and daily thinking and acting.

To do that has been pretty easy to perform, because we had nothing more to enact than provide and understand some very simple objects and correlations that have already been reflected upon and even been written down. Take some snippets from those tons of written material, connect them loosely and you get a basic positive answer.

Later on we will try to apply the metaphor to new media to see if we can use them with profit. For that process to go half right we have to dig a little more into definitions and update ourselves on the contemporary usage of some terms in our little field of exploration.

First, the most basic question: What is a medium?

In daily usage a medium is regularly conceived as the carrier of bits of information. Hence the conception of paper, clay, stone, electromagnetic wavery and the likes as a medium. Needless to say that this kind of usage is a bit shortsighted or should we say narrowminded or even venture for bandwidth limited.

Our guess would be that a more extended conception of medium that includes modulation will help us on. Carrier and modulation viewed together make for a broader set of features, possibilities or bias tendencies of any one medium. Surely the substantial quality of the carrier has great influence on possible modulations it can be burdened with. But then again, modulation techniques change with time and so carrier will allow or suffer new kinds of modulations. Conceive of a slab of stone that could once be painted with say mineral colors, could then be ciseld by harder stone, then by formed steel and can today be imprinted with the help of devices that emit LASER beams of different wave length and is controlled by a sophisticated array of sand based transistors which in turn and in the end ist controlled by some code that is automatically translated from some gibberish formulated in say Turtle Graphics LOGO. I guess everybody can go for the next steps themselves (layers of possibilities of modulation on electromagnetic wavery through the digital domain).

Nevertheless, please come back tomorrow morning, when some of the questions that medium and modulation pose will be partially answered.