CJ Severin

CCS 313

Blog Post #2

When Marshall McLuhan first formulated the concepts of “hot and cold” media, he had a very specific model in mind: television was hot because it provided all of the information necessary to consume it, and books are cold because they provide very little and required readers to work through the content and actively use their imaginations.  Today, however, simply putting the experience of television into the “hot” category is more complicated.  

Using the example of NBC’s recently cancelled sitcom, Community, we can see McLuhan’s concepts becoming complicated.  The original five seasons of the show aired very traditionally on Thursday nights on NBC from 2009 until 2014, “high definition” media, just as McLuhan would have described fifty years ago, but, what’s different is that the continuity of Community existed, exists, and will, in the near future, continue to exist, on more than one medium.  

On the network owned video site, Hulu, for example, there were, and, being on the internet, constantly still are, episodes that were created to be viewed between the televised seasons that expand the story and world of the characters.  This, then, takes the already high definition format of television and pushes further; no one has to imagine what, if anything, happens in the months between seasons because everything that happens is in the webisodes.  The universe of the show is also expanded in non-video format in the form of the Greendale Community College website; modeled after a real college website, this page has newsletters, hours of operation, on campus events, all to create a more realistic, and more dense, world for the characters.  Even more so, each of the main characters in the ensemble cast has their own Twitter account that posted during and after the initial airings of the show on television.  This places the characters not just into a larger world, but into our world by making them into people we can socialize with in the same way as people we actually know.  

Certainly all of this additional content falls under the concept of “hot”, as it leaves increasingly less to the imagination, but, in someways it also increases the amount of participation fully consuming the content of Community, an attribute of “cold” media.  By making the entirety of the show, episodes, webisodes, expanded digital content, social media presence, etc., the show’s creators ask of the viewers to actively immerse themselves in the world of Community, to, in someways, make it real, but not in the “low definition” way a book would, in a much higher definition way.  

Works Cited

McLuhan, Marshall. ""Introduction," "The Medium Is the Message," "Media Hot and Cold." Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT, 1994. 1-32. Print.