The Shelf

Why

I wanted to understand better what "The medium is the message " sentence means. I also wanted to know if McLuhan's framework can be applied to understand how the communication landscape will change with the advent of #AI technologies.

What I liked

The first few chapters are great. The whole framework is laid out and can be absorbed in few reading sessions. The second half of the book are "applications" of the framework itself, e.g. how radio or television shaped the communication landscape.

What I disliked

I don't think the whole framework works, as it is. The concept of hot and cold media seems contradictory sometimes: a medium can be hot from one point of view and cold from another. McLuhan himself later mentioned that hot and cold are intended more as terms to describe different media than as hard categorizations.