Those of you who happened to catch the business section of the NYTimes this morning might have seen this article on the new "Cubic" phone that's being marketed as "the first global mobile phone." Although in theory you can make calls from your AT&T or T-Mobile phone using the same kind of international network, the ra

I pointed out in class today the way too obvious contradiction in McLuhan's distinction of hot and cold content within a single medium (cool jazz and hot jazz). Now that I've had time to think about it, I realize that McLuhan does deal with this. In the middle of page 27, he writes:

"The jazz of the period of the hot new media of movie and radio was hot jazz... Cool jazz came in quite naturally after the first impact of radio and movie had been absorbed."

I'm a little bit confused about McLuhan's idea of the role of the artist. He seems to be saying that the artist must make people aware of the profound cultural changes brought about shifts in the types of media we use. The artist does so (I'm led to believe) by drawing attention to the media as important: it's not what's on television that matters, but the television itself.