Hot Media Hypnosis - The Death of Contemplation

Comatose catatonia and an exploration of hot vs. cool media.

Sep 25, 2024

Nobody knows how to think anymore. We have lost the ability to sit still and reflect. Stillness, quiet, and reflection are key to living a happy life. Contemplation is one of the great gifts of life, the ability to drop out of the hustle and demands of average everydayness and merely reflect on an idea or two or an event or two. The fewer senses stimulated, the better contemplation will go because as you starve your senses, your mind will begin to hallucinate. Could this be the source of contemplation? Soft-core mental hallucinations? It may well be. But this talent is lost, especially among the youth of today. Instead, we willingly submit ourselves to continuous hypnosis and enter into a catatonic state.

Byung-Chul Han distinguishes between the vita activa (active life) and the vita contemplativa (contemplative life). You will be familiar with this distinction if you have listened to my conversations with The Forest Rebel. This is not the distinction of concern in this essay. Another danger to the vita contemplativa is the vita catatonia or catatonic life: comatose hypnosis.

McLuhan distinguishes between hot and cool media. A hot medium extends a single sense in high definition, meaning it is filled with data. Photos are high definition, whereas cartoons are low definition. Cool media are low definition. In cool media, something must be filled in by the audience. Hot media, on the other hand, has little to no participation.

Hieroglyphics are cool, whereas a phonetic alphabet is hot.

Hot media allows for less participation. A lecture is hotter than a seminar; a book is hotter than a dialogue.

The cool is easier to intake and put into our minds, whereas the hot burns the mind on attempted full consumption: "Intensity or high definition engenders specialism and fragmentation in living as in entertainment, which explains why any intense experience must be “forgotten,” “censored,” and reduced to a very cool state before it can be “learned” or assimilated. The Freudian “censor” is less of a moral function than an indispensable condition of learning."1 The censor protects the value and nervous systems, enabling us to adopt new information, media, and technology without being burned. The Censor is a defense system to prevent the panic state new technology would bring by cooling down the media. The cooling system brings about psychic rigor mortis or somnambulism, especially in periods of new technology.

An example is the gifting of steel axes to Australian natives. The stone axe was a symbol of male status and dominance. When the missionaries gave steel axes to everyone, including the women, this emasculated the males and destroyed the social structure.

The medium of money or wheel or writing, or any other form of specialist speedup of exchange and information, will serve to fragment a tribal structure. Similarly, a very much greater speedup, such as occurs with electricity, may serve to restore a tribal pattern of intense involvement such as took place with the introduction of radio in Europe, and is now tending to happen as a result of TV in America. Specialist technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes.2

William Blake sought to use organic myth as an antidote to the fallout of mechanization. This would not work in the electric age because electricity is mythic. Myth is "instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period" 33. Myth is inherently heuristic, condensing ideas, practices, and lessons into the most efficient mimetic format. The instant speed and compression of electricity share this quality with myth. Unsurprisingly, mimesis (literally, memes) have accelerated in their new electronic habitat. Memes are the mythology of the electric age, shrinking down information so it can travel through the network and burrow quickly into the mind. We quickly unpack the meme and put it in terms of literate culture fragmentation. McLuhan states, "We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes."3

McLuhan compares the form of the Electric Age to the form of Biblical exegesis. The Bible scholar must do their study linearly, but in their study, they recognize the spiraling nature of the Bible. "The subject (Bible) treats of the relations between God and man, and between God and the world, and of the relations between man and his neighbor — all these subsist together, and act and react upon one another at the same time."4 As a consequence, any single part will flower out into a representation of the whole. Electric age is the same in its redundant form, "in which the concentric pattern is imposed by the instant quality, and overlay in depth, of electric speed."5

The electric age first created anxiety, but it now creates boredom. In the unindustrialized world, electricity did not have the same jarring effect. It did have a jarring effect, just not the same one it had for us because the electric age rebirths oral culture. Oral traditions were automatically eliminated in industrialized areas, so the onset of the electric age forced the population to re-develop oral culture. Catch-up countries did not suffer the same flip-flop.

Backward countries, as McLuhan describes them, are cool, whereas we are hot. But there is a reversal that takes place:

In terms of the reversal of procedures and values in the electric age, the past mechanical time was hot, and we of the TV age are cool. The waltz was a hot, fast mechanical dance suited to the industrial time in its moods of pomp and circumstance. In contrast, the Twist is a cool, involved and chatty form of improvised gesture. The jazz of the period of the hot new media of movie and radio was hot jazz. Yet jazz of itself tends to be a casual dialogue form of dance, quite lacking in the repetitive and mechanical forms of the waltz. Cool jazz came in quite naturally after the first impact of radio and movie had been absorbed.6

Periods of transition are hot, so hot cultural media becomes popular. In slow periods of technological stagnation, cultural forms cool down. Cultures become programmable. Hot and cool media are interchanged depending on what is necessary in each particular situation. "Whole cultures could now be programmed to keep their emotional climate stable in the same way that we have begun to know something about maintaining equilibrium in the commercial economies of the world."7

Lewis Mumford, in his writings on cities, allows for an understanding of hot and cool population arrangements. In ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy (real democracy, not the accursed religious shibboleth we know it as today), social organization was markedly cool. The individual directly participated in almost all aspects of city life. The individual was expected to engage with the agora, both economically and politically. This enabled a diversity of individual expression. Now, due to the increased scale of economy and political life, as well as the dense crowding of big cities, social organization has become hot. McLuhan states: "For the highly developed situation is, by definition, low in opportunities of participation, and rigorous in its demands of specialist fragmentation from those who would control it."8 You may object that the big city allows for a diverse array of forms of social expression and participation, but this is not the case. In the medium of the city, there is very little to be filled in by the inhabitant (observer). Rather, the inhabitant is granted various surrogate activities to fill time. Diverse expression of culture is quickly commercialized and sold back to the individual.

McLuhan contrasts FDR and Calvin Coolidge. Calvin Coolidge was a cool President in the media sense. This statement can be interpreted in every possible way and will always be correct. Coolidge did not have a strong personality on display for the American people, so the media took the opportunity to fill him in, marketing him as "cool Cal." FDR, on the other hand, was a hot President. (Please only interpret that sentence in the way I meant it.) His fireside chats left little for the American people to fill in. They got to know him because he spoke to them directly. We can still evaluate Presidents on this basis. A hot candidate is better suited for times of distress and change, whereas a cool candidate is better suited for periods of stability and consistent growth.

Hot media does not produce empathy because it blocks participation. The preponderance of hot media creates apathy and numbness. McLuhan discusses how some drivers were offered a $5 reduction in traffic fines if they watched a movie displaying horrendous traffic accidents. Violent, graphic media is undeniably hot, prying itself into the mind. This is why, after enough exposure to gore or porn, users no longer get the same kick that they once did, needing to move on to other things. At the same time, nuclear deterrence practically beckons the use of the bomb. The oversaturation of information about nuclear explosives leaves people apathetic. McLuhan states, "When all the available resources and energies have been played up in an organism or in any structure there is some kind of reversal of pattern. The spectacle of brutality used as deterrent can brutalize."9

Hot and cool media have different effects in hot and cool cultures. Hot media like radio and television thrust into a cool and low literacy culture is extremely disruptive, whereas it is normal in our hot culture.

The more saturated media is, the less space it gives you to exist. Hot media is how media colonizes the mind. Super hot media is hypnosis. When you have no space to think, the media does for you. Make media too cool, however, and you begin to hallucinate as your senses demand input. Hot media has its place when information needs to be rapidly uploaded to the mind. However, participation is better for committing information to memory. The cooler the media, the less stimulation of the senses, the more space there is for contemplation. Double-screened subway surfer TikTok slop is the opposite and complete enemy of contemplation. It puts the user into a comatose state of hypnosis. To live a better life and engage in the vita contemplativa, disengage from hot media.

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