Hot and Cold

This is in response to the previous post about hot and cold, but I'm writing it as a new entry because I'm under the impression we are supposed to do that if our comments will be particularly long and cover slightly different ideas. Correct me if I'm wrong!
Anyways, Silversprung and I discussed the passage on page 27 of McLuhan to get a better handle on the differences between hot and cold. Everything that follows is half Silversprung's as she and I worked together. The passage starts with "In terms of the theme of media hot and cold, backward countries are cool, and we are hot. The 'city slicker' is hot, and the rustic is cool."
We made a list of things that are hot: city slicker, "past mechanical time" which we interpreted as the Industrial Revolution, the waltz, film, and some kinds of jazz. In the cold category are the rustics, the tv age, the Twist, television, and improvisational jazz.
The difference between hot and cold is that hot allows no room for interpretation or choices. The city slicker has to follow a set schedule (like getting to an office job at 9) while a rustic is not bound to time in the same way. The waltz has specific steps and counts while the Twist allows for non-standard moves that are created in the "heat of the moment" (hehe, to confuse things even more).
What we were really confused about is television and film. We decided that film follows a set narrative and back in 1964 also demanded set showing times. You had to go to a movie theatre to see a film. Television gives the viewers different choices and there are no set times. However in present day with DVDs and home movie systems, are films still really that hot? Especially those DVDs that come with alternate endings. All those choices make film seem pretty toasty.
Finally, we thought that blogs are very cold, freezing even. There are endless opportunities to revise, argue with the author, and there is not a set visual model for blogs