Was talking to a customer yesterday, and he asked me if kids were reading comics. I told him, mostly not, that they seemed to prefer playing videogames, and that they seemed to want to "be Spider-man, not read about Spider-man."

Then I mentioned that the 'medium is the message.'

"What do you mean?"

"Haven't you heard of Marshall McLuhan?"

Hard to realize that such a pop icon of my generation would be simply forgotten a generation later.

So I Wikipedia'd up the name, and came up with this description of what I was talking about. Mainly, I'm reprinting it, because of the prominence of comics. I probably learned about McLuhan between the times I read comics (as a kid and as an adult), so I didn't remember that he made comics a cornerstone of his theories.

Also the description leaves it up to the current generation to decide if video or online games are hot or cool media. I'd guess, by the definition, that video games would be cool, just like comics. But I still think they work on a different part of the brain -- the medium is the message.

The other thing that occurs to me, is that the bigger the T.V.'s and the more high-def, the closer they become to immersive media, or 'hot' media. Turn off the lights and watch a high definition 64" screen from eight feet away, and it would sure feel like a movie.

To wit:

"Hot" and "cool" media

McLuhan also claimed in the first part of Understanding Media, that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Some media, like the movies, enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image. McLuhan contrasted this with TV, which he claimed requires more effort on the part of viewer to determine meaning, and comics, which due to their minimal presentation of visual detail require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be "hot", intensifying one single sense "high definition", demanding a viewer's attention, and a comic book to be "cool" and "low definition", requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value

End Quote.

Fun stuff to think about to those of you who have never been exposed to his theories.

McLuhan is also responsible for the phrase "global village." All thought up 30 and 40 years ago.

He was adopted as the patron saint of Wired Magazine in it's first few years.