A Bit More Detail

Canada's--Toronto's--biggest media theorist ever, Marshall McLuhan, distinguished between hot and cold media.

"Pukka Orchestra "Listen To The Radio" (Original Video and Song)" (Watch on YouTube)

(Yelle's remix is much better than the original.)

Hot versus cold, passionnate or disengaged, participatory or distanced: All these qualities matter.

The hot media are those, which have a large influence on humans and its sensous perception. According to McLuhan these media even possess a "destructive strength" (for example "stone axes" see the point "the medium is the message"). The pioneer of the media ranks the writing, the phonetic alphabet, the book, the photography and also the radio among this kind of medium. These objects of communication place much data and detailed informations at the users disposal, which are mainly concentrate on one sense of the recipient.

It is affected by this, but remains rather passive in the behavior. The cold media have a small influence strength on humans. The reason for this is, that they offer little details and information, and are not optically delightful for humans. To use and understand these media humans must actively deal with these media. McLuhan calls the televi-sion, the telephone or the caricature as example for it. Finally we mention the fact that a medium is not only hot or cold, but must be regarded always standing in a relationship to another medium.

The medium is the message, after all. This difference might not last, but I think it works now, at least.

Me, I'm very strongly biased towards hot media. Written language, images of all kinds, radio, most definitely the book and the Internet: These are all media that I actively embrace and make use of, as readers of this blog certainly know. They're static, they require constant engagement, constant storage, constant interpretation. Cold media? I don't own a television, I most frequently go to movies not so much on their own terms as to be with other viewers--although I do like many!--, and I discontinued my cell phone account in February 2007.

And you?

"But it was the only local paper the newsstand had left!" was the last defense that I could think of as some of my co-workers stared at the copy of the National Post I'd left on the staffroom table today.

Founded by Conrad Black back in 1998, when he was still a newspaper magnate and not a convicted felon, the Post was Black's attempt to shift the tone of public discourse in (English) Canada further to the right, with a lavish budget for high-profile columnists and expensively-produced extra coverage of arts and culture and politics. Unfortunately, after Black sold the Post and the rest of his newspaper chain to CanWest in 2001, so as to abandon his Canadian citizenship and become a British lord, CanWest decided to stop the financial hemorrhage by imposing a budget and trim coverage.

The result? The Post's circulation dropped, sharply, and hasn't yet recovered. A May 2007 survey revealed that in the critical Toronto market, the National Post comes a distant third, behind the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. Despite a recent redesign,
things like the decision to stop circulation in Atlantic Canada outside of Halifax lends credence to media journalist Frank Moher's caustic assessment of the Post's prospects.

The newspaper wars are long over and the Post has quietly and conclusively lost. Neither paper much trumpeted their circulation figures when the Audit Bureau of Circulation numbers came out last Fall, as both had lost readership over the previous 12 months (as had most of the papers in North America, besieged as they are by the Web). But where the Globe was down 1%, the Post was down a brutal 10%. So it may be that my daily one-man focus group on the streets of Calgary wasn't all that reliable. Still, cauterizing its wounds, the Post can at least claim to be a more national national newspaper than Canada's National Newspaper (for all the good that'll do them). As for the Globe, pretty soon it'll read more or less exactly as it did back in the 1970s. Then it'll just be a case of getting Justin Trudeau elected Prime Minister and, why, everything will be back to normal.

It's probably unlikely that the Post will disappear altogether, if only because it's CanWest's flagship newspaper. It's equally unlikely that the Post will be able to be anything but a scrappy right-wing voice; Black's original vision of a Canada that was ready for his particular vision of an Ameriphilic hard right, perhaps unsurprisingly, turns out not to have had that much tenure on reality.