{"id":5220,"date":"2014-10-21T08:56:30","date_gmt":"2014-10-21T14:56:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5220"},"modified":"2017-08-23T13:33:56","modified_gmt":"2017-08-23T17:33:56","slug":"smartphones-are-hot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5220","title":{"rendered":"Smartphones are hot"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"hot\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This post, along with seventy-eight\u00a0others, is collected in the book\u00a0<\/em>Utopia Is Creepy<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The lightbulb, Marshall McLuhan wrote at the start of his 1964\u00a0book\u00a0Understanding Media<\/em>, is an example of a medium without content. Walk into a dark room and hit the light switch, and the bulb generates a new environment for you even though the bulb\u00a0transmits no information. The idea of a medium without content is hard to grasp\u00a0\u2014 it doesn’t make sense<\/em> in the context of our assumptions about\u00a0media \u2014\u00a0but it’s fundamental to understanding McLuhan’s contention that the medium is the message, i.e., that the medium creates an environment independent of the content or information it transmits.<\/p>\n

So what are we to make of the smartphone, the\u00a0medium\u00a0of the moment, our portable environment? If, as McLuhan argued, the content of any new medium is an old medium, the content of the smartphone would seem to be all\u00a0media: telephone, television, radio, cinema, printed book, electronic book, comic book, record, MP3, newspaper, magazine, letter, newsletter, email, telegraph, conversation, peep show, library, school, lecture, ATM, desktop, laptop, love note, medical record, rap sheet. Contentwise, the smartphone is Whitmanesque: it contains multitudes.\u00a0The smartphone is what happens when\u00a0the architecture\u00a0of media collapses. It’s\u00a0a black hole full of light: information supercompressed but radiant. In its singularity, it\u00a0might be described as the first post-media medium. Its\u00a0circuitry dissolves plurality;\u00a0the media becomes the medium.<\/p>\n

Bursting with information, the smartphone is, in McLuhan’s terms, a hot medium, maybe the hottest imaginable. It invades the sensorium of its user with an absolute imperialist zeal. Flooding\u00a0the visual sense, it allows no signal but its own. To look into the screen of a smartphone is to be lost to the world. Like every hot medium, the smartphone\u00a0isolates and fragments the self. It individualizes, alienates. Not only does it reverse what McLuhan described as the coolness of the aural phone, turning it into a superheated visual medium, but it\u00a0reverses the entire re-tribalization pattern that McLuhan saw emerging from electric media. The smartphone out-de-tribalizes even the printed book. The smartphone’s\u00a0“interactivity” is a ruse, for the only activity it allows is the activity it mediates. Its dominance precludes involvement and participation.<\/p>\n

But that can’t be right. What does one do with a smartphone but participate\u00a0\u2014\u00a0interact, converse, communicate, shop, create, get involved? Here we find\u00a0the conundrum of the smartphone, the conundrum of our new artificial environment \u2014 and the conundrum that wraps around McLuhan’s hot\/cool media dialectic.<\/p>\n

In a 1967 essay<\/a>, the critic Richard Kostelanetz wrote that McLuhan’s books “offer a cool experience in a hot medium.” The lo-def ambiguity\u00a0of the writing\u00a0fights against the hi-def clarity\u00a0of the printed word; the information\u00a0demands the reader’s involvement while the medium forbids it. It may be that the smartphone is of a similar nature,\u00a0hot and cool at once (but never lukewarm). At the very least, one could\u00a0say that the smartphone creates an environment that encourages participation\u00a0at a distance: participation as performance. The smartphone re-tribalizes by putting us always on\u00a0display, by eating away at\u00a0our sense of the private self, but it de-tribalizes by isolating us in an abstract\u00a0world, a world of our own. You hit the light switch, and the bulb comes on and you find yourself in\u00a0an empty room full of people.\u00a0To put it another way: participation is the content of the smartphone, and the content, as McLuhan wrote, is “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” The illusion of involvement conceals its absence. Here comes Walt\u00a0Whitman, alone and isolated, dreaming dreams of connection, turning a barbaric yawp into silent words on a flat\u00a0page.<\/p>\n

Image: Erik Drost<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post, along with seventy-eight\u00a0others, is collected in the book\u00a0Utopia Is Creepy. The lightbulb, Marshall McLuhan wrote at the start of his 1964\u00a0book\u00a0Understanding Media, is an example of a medium without content. Walk into a dark room and hit the light switch, and the bulb generates a new environment for you even though the bulb\u00a0transmits […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5220"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8050,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5220\/revisions\/8050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}