A central binding theory behind the media ecology of Marshall McLuhan was his idea of hot and cool media. At the time of McLuhan’s writing about hot and cool media, his ideas were inferred by the informational intakes of film and radio in comparison to TV and telephony. That the difference between hot and cold media are media whose experiences were either passive or active.

In terms of proximal distance hot media is like being up-close to something – viscerally, and cool media are distantly removed. Hot media are hyper forms of information made up by high-definition sound and image, whose message is composed in fullest detail and clarity. Media like radio, films, photography, and printing were considered by McLuhan to be rich sensory experiences that emphasize a specific sense, like sight or just hearing, altering the ratio of human senses. Cool media instead lack detail as low-definition media which cause the viewer to fill in the gaps of missing information with multiple sensations. Media such as books, television, and telephone required active participation. McLuhan appeared to be preferred the “cool” viewer or listener who recalibrated and used all of their senses to coolly observe and construct messages. Therefore, hot media require little to no extra work from the viewer who is made passive by being tantalized and dominated by a hi-res spectacle.


McLuhan’s lens was informed by the clarity of the technologies in his time. The low-definition quality of television which he determined to be a defining feature of the TV medium has since been discredited as too technologically deterministic since the character of TV changed with digital cable and satellite TV. Also, some internet media are uploaded in low resolution format, but with high resolution media, networks re-prioritize low or high-quality media playback based on bandwidth. If bandwidth performance increases, then a low image and sound can jump to higher fidelity, and the opposite is true if bandwidth decreases.


Such differences in digital technology undermine the theory of hot and cool media since media content can exist in a variable state of definition, and a mediums quality can be modernized. With TV there is no fuzzy image where we are guessing what is being represented, because now like a film we can see the stream in the highest definition of 1080p and 4K resolution.



The cool and hot forms of participation are also challenged by the interactivity of media sharing and commentary as a live act. Yet the terms hot and cold still relate to contemporary media consumption. The internet can function cinematically where we watch explanatory and podcast conversations in high definition coolly, while participate in live chats hotly filling in the gaps with extra information that comes from an audience response to a transmission. Hot and cold seem to switch sides now that participation has become real-time tool and high-definition a standard way for viewing transmission while co-existing with lower quality forms of the same content. Between hot and cool, there can be warm(th). Warm media is an ideal undifferentiation between passivity and participation, when watching and interaction collaboratively create feedback. Since hot and cool media are also deterministic terms, warm media is intermedia approach to handling both ideas since the closed-circuit or one way communication of McLuhan’s era has changed to real-time networks with multiple actors updating information streams. Warm media is also a middle process of transference which little considered. Hot and cool are also a duality which bypass the warm state of media. This skipping over missing segment of transference is comparable to a process known as sublimation,  the act of solids turning to gasses without become liquid which can be attached hot and cool media with another kind of terminology: Water.



The vocabulary of water has been incessantly invoked for communications because of water’s natural and engineered carrying capacity. Terms like signal flow, electrical current, channels, multimedia filtration, streams, volume, wet or dry audio, the liquidity of video image, are just a few of the metaphors that engineers, electricians, technicians, and theorists have used to describe the activity and make up of electronic communication. How water is a gaseous vapor. Cool (cold) water is a solid ice. In between would be the liquid form of water. Perhaps the gases should be thought of as the signal in the air (the cloud of computing raining down) and the ice the analog transmitted result (the screen and speakers). The water analogy would be process of the travel or flow between the sender and receiver. But if hot is the color red, and cool the color of blue, then the blending of the two in the middle would be purple, a color commonly associated with vaporwave.



Vaporwave is a internet cultural movement, made up by the retro style of producing music and reusing with old video, graphics, and ads from the 1980’s and 1990’s. Vaporwave is both a reliving and repackaging of the past with re-appropriated mass media. At its onset, Vaporwave seemed to critique of mass consumerism but this critique is canceled out by the aesthetic nostalgia and identification with mass media, consumer electronics, and corporate branding. Participation in Vaporwave happens when the re-authoring old content is one of commentary on social media boards, and sedating audiences with future-past music and video that are familiar, alien, hollow, and comedic all at once because the audience is recalling an old memory while making a new one. Vaporwave excels because the listener and viewer can recognize the old sources and is excited by the familiarity of a remixed past happening in the present, making it a very post-modern artistic practice and online trend.



Perhaps hot and cool media combined create an antithesis of the other through narrative. Narrative can happen as either a movie that lays out a discrete message and spoon feeds the viewer, or exists in a videogame whose meaning is generated or arrived at with player actions. A completed narrative that is linear or roaming is hard to fit into the categories of hot and cold. Today’s media landscape is one of perpetual liveness over the internet as consumption and interaction can blur the creative content roles for senders and receivers alike. The lost or broken future of promises advertised in mass media that make up creative filed like vaporwave are really the resonating search for the future through process. The process of purple/warm media is an environment that is made up from the intersection of media signal, objects, and infrastructure. The sublimation is the stream of cyberspace that we cannot enter just like the gaseous signals we cannot actually perceive. So, we look at the screen and hear the speaker, waiting for the message of what to do next rather what we can be doing. Would the dissolvement of passivity and participation end the paradigm of post-modernity with its pointless recursion of saving and reviewing the past? Is the past in the air and present in the solidness and the future the cross section of liquidity?