“Literacy and Technology: Hot, Cold, or Just Right? Finding The Happy Medium”

In my last post, I talked about how people adjust to change, whether that means change specifically in response to teaching with technology, changes in how we define literacy, or change more generally. I mentioned that the process of undergoing change requires openness and vulnerability. When I think about changes in technology and the excerpts from Gunther Kress and Marshall McLuhan, this concept still seems relevant to me. Everyone might not immediately jump on “every technological bandwagon” all at once, especially because “if we were to accept fully and directly every shock to our structures of awareness, we would soon be nervous wrecks, doing double-takes and pressing panic buttons every minute” (Palmeri p. 110-111 and McLuhan p. 24). “Technologies become significant when social and cultural conditions allow them to become significant” or when more and more people adapt and open themselves up to certain technological changes (Kress, p. 18). It seems like a process of adjustment and conscious thought has to happen before people take their next technological or semantic leap of faith.

I was very intrigued by McLuhan’s discussion of “hot media” and “cool media” and how thinking about these descriptors for media can help us think about the interactions we have with technology/media and each other (I also can't get Katy Perry's song "Hot n Cold" out of my head now). If “hot media” like movies, photographs, books, the phonetic alphabet, or lectures are so filled with information and data that they do not require the audience to participate very much in order for them to get the message, then I would describe the audience as playing a more passive role or relationship with the media. On the other hand, “cool media” like seminars, dialogue, comics, the telephone, and television require higher participation and a more active role by the audience because an increasing level of information has to be filled in by the listener or audience. Since McLuhan introduced these terms in 1964, I am curious about how he would qualify some of the newer or more modern forms of media that have surfaced over the fifty years. In my opinion, it seems that social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. have caused an overall gradual cooling of media since so many of these platforms are interactive and sustain themselves on the active participation of their users. Even if one might argue that an Instagram photo alone could be “hot media” rather than “cool media,” most times the visual itself might not provide the viewer with all the information needed. People have to participate through comments or perhaps click on the photo’s location or hashtags to get more context and information about what a user is sharing in the particular photo. However, even with all of these interactive components, I wonder if the “glued-to-our-screens” phenomenon is actually still a passive practice that is “fragmenting” and “detribalizing” us as a society rather than “retribalizing” us in a humane way (McLuhan, p. 24).

Katy Perry wants to know if the media is hot or cold.

Kress has thoroughly confused Snoopy even more...

In the Kress reading, I found that we are constantly encountering complications with our definitions of literacy. Some cultures and languages do not even have a word that would neatly translate to our English word for literacy. Additionally, the tripartite definition that Kress proposes is difficult to make sense of once you start using more than one mode, resource, or dissemination method. It seems that just as we have to find a happy medium for our media temperature, we also have to find a happy medium for our literacy terminology that satisfies many situations.