Booin' at McLuhan

I dreaded this reading from day one when I saw it on the schedule. Well... perhaps "dread" is the wrong word. I guess I was just not looking forward to it. It comes down to this:

Ol' Marshall annoys the hell out of me.

He annoyed me back in Intro, and (lo and behold) he annoys me now. His writing flows like a hummingbird. Just when he gets to something that sounds interesting, BAM! He's off to another subject. It's a pity the man is dead, because it means that I can't take him out myself. Anyway...

His deal of hot and cold media made some sense, but he was so insistent upon cramming everything into these two diametric labels that I was just left thinking "so what?" I felt he really tried to pidgeon hole media with this concept, but I feel that it's deceiving to act as if any of these media forms are single-sided as far as their "hot" and "cold"-ness. TV, he says, is an example of cold media (meaning it's interactive... right?)... but how is it interactive to sit there and watch a program? I guess you can change the channel... but you're still not really interacting with it all that much. So why did he have to insist upon these labels? No need, Marshall, no need.

That's pretty much it... So much for "Understanding Media."