The Medium is the what?

Buried within the phrase “The medium is the message” by Marshall McLuhan are some astounding ideas about this belief. In order to understand the phrase itself, some general ideas must be understood. First, the “medium” must be defined. In Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, he is using “medium” as a general term. In this context, the medium is any form of technology that allows us to do something we were unable to do before. This extends the medium from being specific forms of media to any form of technology including glasses, radios, and all other examples. This allows medium to be categorized as an extension of ourselves. Now that the premise of the “medium” in this context is understood, we can focus on the message.
The message according to McLuhan is what you get from whatever the medium is. This suggests that the message is dependent on what type of medium is used. It also suggests that the content of the message is no longer important ­because it relies on the medium. Through deductive reasoning, we can say that because the message relies on the medium, and the medium is any form of technology just as the message is what we get from it, that technology shapes our world. This is a technology deterministic view that states that the medium will affect not only how the message is viewed, but also what the message is. A great example of how the medium can shape the message is the infamous Kennedy, Nixon debates. In this example, those who were using the radio as their medium felt Nixon was the obvious winner; but those who used television as their medium, saw a handsome, tall, and clean cut Kennedy and felt he was the obvious winner. This is also an example of how the context does not matter because what was being said was not the deciding factor, it was what was viewed.
Digging deeper into the technologically deterministic idea, we can say that technology has caused all of our problems (the idea that makes up this premise). We can say that problems like obesity have all resulted from the advancement of technology. This is an ideal that a lot of Americans hold dearly. We can see this from the lawsuits against fast food restaurants. It has become easy to blame everyone else for our problems but ourselves. Entertainment companies are making more video games like the wii that require more out of the player than a simple thumb movement. Ideas like these are the essence of the technologically deterministic view. It makes life seem as if it is out of our control, like there is no way to break away from technology. Fortunately, this is not McLuhan’s belief.
In McLuhan’s “understanding radio”, he describes “hot and cold” medium. Although I do not understand the exact meaning of this, I do know that television is a cool medium and an example of this covered in the article was the fact that Senator McCarthy was forgotten once he switched to television (page 235). The idea of cold and hot medium seems to me a lot like technology determinism but this may be because the ideas are so complex that they are easy to confuse them. The article “the medium is the message” by Mark Federman attempts to clear up the confusion by taking each idea an explaining it. In this article, Federman states that “Marshall McLuhan was concerned with the observation that we tend to focus on the obvious” and because of this, his ideas are more in dept so as to have us reach our own conclusions but he also guides us by giving us the fundamentals. He even goes on to explain the importance of knowing that the medium is the message which is that it allows us to be one step ahead of “change”.
It was very hard for me to say exactly what the phrase “the medium is the message” actually means to me, because I am unsure of the idea. I cannot say that I agree or disagree with the phrase. I understand certain areas like technology determinism and slightly the meaning of medium, but so far, the rest of this idea is completely over my head. The thought of hot and cool medium throws me absolutely off. I would think television would be viewed as a hot medium because in my opinion it does not “reject hot figures and hot issues and people from the hot press media”. On the contrary, I that it does the opposite because if you turn on a show like entertainment tonight, or even the news; it is easy to see that the headline are whatever will catch the viewer’s attention. My personal experience seems to be keeping me from fully accepting the idea.

Understanding radio (pg 235) Marshall McLuhan
“What does the Medium is the Message mean?”, Mark Federman