GlowGlobe Warning
This year I bought a fifty inch plasma television,
and a blue-ray DVD player,
and as I examined the various hairs, beads of sweat, pimples, melted make-up and other fauna on Tony Soprano's face, I realized that as television becomes high definition it is no longer COOL
but HOT. 
Hot in the sense of "cool and hot" that Marshall McLuhan spoke about.
- from Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.
and a blue-ray DVD player,
and as I examined the various hairs, beads of sweat, pimples, melted make-up and other fauna on Tony Soprano's face, I realized that as television becomes high definition it is no longer COOL but HOT. Hot in the sense of "cool and hot" that Marshall McLuhan spoke about. This is the Globe Warming. A few degrees rise in the vast waste ocean of the great unwatched, eye caps melt, a change in "see" level, and the end of the ice-cool age. Existential extinction?
"For in operating on society with a new technology, it is not the incised area that is most affected. The area of impact and incision is numb. It is the entire system that is changed."
- from Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.
2 comments:
Hey Bongo, I've been outta the loop, just getting back in. I'm going to get back at John Brownlow's Streetphoto.
I like McLuhan, he lived about 15 blocks from where I live now in Toronto so this caught my eye. People have forgotten him. He's still pretty good if you interpret him for the times.
Good to here from you mon! I started thinking how everything is "res'in" up - cameras, stereos, tvs, phones, computers etc - all becoming "hotter". If I read my 1966 moth eaten paperback edition of Understanding Media correctly the end result could be that "reality" might become more hallucinatory. In any event it WILL have an effect. McLuhan was a certifiable genius. I wish he hadn't got so bogged down with his hot/cold analogy but he loved word play and I bet he enjoyed the challenge of keeping it going.
see you at Johnies.
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