"Comin' in hot, in high definition..."

Joel Plaskett's song on the subject is probably the best interpretation of 'hot and cool' media out there. Today, a special edition of The McLuhan Newsletter to share it with you.

Last spring I led a group of students through ‘Understanding Media Intensive, part one,’ a word-by-word reading, exploration, and discussion of the first seven chapters of ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.’ This was the third time I’ve led a group through, spending a few hours a week reading, examining, digesting, applying.

The first time I did it, back in 2020, I didn’t think I would do assignments. Who wants homework? Apparently many people do. So each week as I prepared, I came up with assignments for people to complete, and I discovered that they are actually a great way - even a necessary way - to learn. Everyone has a different perspective, a different way of relating, a different way of expressing. And, under the heading that ‘understanding isn’t a point of view’, many different perspectives add up to greater understanding and meaning.

I encourage students to complete the assignment creatively, and I encourage brevity. If you want to write a paper, keep it to a single page, but feel free to interpret the material and express it by whichever means feels right to you.

A Constellation of Effects:

One memorable assignment was completed by Twila Bakker on the subject of ‘tetrads’ or the four Laws of Media discovered and developed by Marshall and Eric McLuhan in the early 1970s. They discovered that while different technologies obviously do different things:

“We found that everything man makes and does, every process, every style, every artefacgt, every poem, painting, gimmick, gadget, theory, technology—every product of human effort—manifested the same four dimensions.” (‘Laws of Media: The New Science,’ Marshall and Eric McLuhan, 1988)

Namely, they ENHANCE or amplify some human function, OBSOLESCE or take over from something else, RETRIEVE something or way of doing things in a new form, and tend to REVERSE or FLIP when pushed over a certain tipping point — a topic we will get into with next week’s newsletter on chapter 3 ‘The Reversal of the Overheated Medium.’

Tetrads (a group of four) and the Laws of Media are a favourite topic, a fun workshop (I led one yesterday with a group put together by Matt Klein of Zine)

The tag on Twila’s mobile reads:

“A constellation of effects from Gutenberg’s Galaxy based on the tetrads for ‘written word,’ ‘grammar,‘ and ‘rhetoric’ in HMM and EM’s ‘Laws of Media.’”

She took these three tetrads and created a three-dimensional mobile using the parts the three subject (written word, grammar, rhetoric) have in common as connection points. Amazing. She kindly sent it to me after the class and it’s a treasure.

“Fill in the blanks, baby.”

To Joel Plaskett.

I’m going to brag a bit here because it’s been my fortune to have some really great people in my UMI course. Honestly, there’s no dead weight. I think a certain kind of person signs up for that class, and the group that comes together is truly special, every time. We get students, teachers, Professors Emeritus, professionals from all kinds of industries from engineering to marketing, technologists, artists, even farmers, and from all over the ‘global village’—but they all have in common a desire to understand the relationship between technology and culture and how we are shaped in between them.

To cover all 33 chapters with a some context takes 36 classes of 2-3 hours each over about 18 months. It’s also not inexpensive, though with my course partner, San Francisco-based art and technology non-profit Gray Area we do offer several full scholarships.

Joel did Part One of UMI which ended as summer began (Part Two of three starts January 7th, enrollment opens soon) and wrote a song as his entry for the assignment for Chapter Two: Media Hot and Cold.

You can listen to it here on Joel’s substack:

Notes from the flip side...

It’s really great. With both music and lyrics he nails the essence of high and low definition, the that “the hot form excludes and the cool form includes.”

Joel’s currently touring and I’m going to see him play in Kingston on Monday, hopefully he’ll play ‘Fill in the Blanks.’

Thanks for reading,

Andrew