Smartphones Are Hot

They're also cool.

Today’s Sunday Rerun takes up the question: What would Marshall McLuhan make of the smartphone? I wrote this in 2014, when the smartphone had displaced the laptop and desktop as our personal computer of choice but had not yet become our heart’s desire.

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Image of ice cave, from Apple’s “One Night on iPhone 7” ad campaign.

The lightbulb, Marshall McLuhan wrote at the start of his 1964 book Understanding Media, is an example of a medium without content. Walk into a dark room and hit the light switch, and the bulb generates a new environment for you even though the bulb transmits no information.

The concept of a medium without content is hard to grasp. It doesn’t make sense in the context of our assumptions about media. But it’s fundamental to understanding McLuhan’s contention that the medium is the message — that every medium creates an environment independent of the content it transmits and that it’s the environment, much more than the content, that alters the shape of people’s thoughts and lives.

So what are we to make of the smartphone, our all-purpose medium, our portable environment? If, as McLuhan argued, the content of any new medium is an old medium, the content of the smartphone would seem to be all the media of the past: telephone, television, radio, cinema, printed book, electronic book, comic book, record album, MP3, newspaper, magazine, letter, newsletter, email, telegraph, peep show, library, ATM, desktop, laptop, love note, medical record, rap sheet. Contentwise, the diminutive device is Whitmanesque: it contains multitudes.

The smartphone is what you get when the architecture of media collapses. It’s a black hole full of light: information supercompressed but radiant. In its singularity, it might be described as the first postmedia medium. Its circuitry dissolves difference, renders all content equal and equally disposable. Media becomes medium.

Dense-packed with information, the smartphone is, in McLuhan’s terms, a hot medium, maybe the hottest imaginable. It invades the sensorium with an absolute imperialist zeal. Flooding the visual and often the auditory and even tactile senses, it allows no signal but its own. To look into the screen of a smartphone is to be lost to the world. The gadget becomes an extension of the user but, more important, the user becomes an extension of the gadget.

Like every hot medium, the smartphone isolates and fragments the self. It individualizes, alienates. Not only does it reverse what McLuhan described as the coolness of the old aural telephone, turning it into a superheated visual medium; it reverses the entire retribalization pattern that McLuhan saw emerging from electric media. The smartphone is more isolating than even the printed book, McLuhan’s totemic hot medium. The phone’s celebrated “interactivity” is a ruse, for the only activity it allows is the activity it mediates. Its dominance over our senses precludes involvement and participation.

But wait. That can’t be right. What does one do with a smartphone but participate — interact, converse, communicate, shop, create, comment, get involved? Here we find the conundrum of the phone, the conundrum of our new artificial environment, and the conundrum that wraps around McLuhan’s hot/cool media dialectic.

In a 1967 essay in the New York Times, the critic Richard Kostelanetz, turning the dialectic onto its creator, wrote that McLuhan’s books “offer a cool experience in a hot medium.” The low-definition ambiguity of McLuhan’s gnomic writing fights against the high-definition clarity of the printed words on the page. The content demands the reader’s interpretive involvement while the medium forbids it.

It may be that the smartphone is of a similar nature, hot and cool at once (but never lukewarm). At the very least, one could say that the phone surrounds us with an environment that encourages participation at a distance: participation as performance, as an act of content creation; participation without real involvement.

The smartphone retribalizes by putting us always on display, by eating away at our sense of the private self, but it detribalizes by isolating us in an abstract world, a world of our own. You hit the light switch, the bulb comes on, and you find yourself in an empty room full of people. To put it another way: participation is the content of the smartphone, and the content of any medium is, as McLuhan wrote, “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” The illusion of involvement conceals its absence.

Here comes Walt Whitman, alone and isolate, dreaming dreams of connection, turning a barbaric yawp into silent words on a flat page.