COMM 150, 337: Writing, print, TV, "hot" and "cool" media

One of media critic Neil Postman's main criticisms of television news is that TV is better adapted to showing visuals than it is to sustained, logical thought. Therefore, he says, we have lost some of the clarity and precision of thought we had before TV replaced print media as our dominant source of information. To the extent Postman's argument is founded in fact (and I believe largely it is), the difference lies in the nature of print media.

When we read words on a page, we don't have emotional cues like body language and facial expression to help us understand their full meaning. All we have is the words, and that forces writers to be careful of how they present facts through the written word. The late Richard Marius, director of the writing program at Harvard, noted that the difference was already apparent to the ancient Greeks. In A Writer's Companion (1991), Marius wrote:

Reading is hard work. The written words lie there, as Socrates told Phaedrus in a famous dialogue, without the help of a living person to explain them. They must speak for themselves. If we misunderstand them, no voice speaks out of the writing to correct our mistakes. (6)

The upshot: Writers have to be clear and logical. "Good writers," adds Marius, "know how easily they may be misunderstood, how quickly they may fatigue readers, and how hard they must work to convey the meaning they intend."

And readers, as Marius suggested, have to make an effort to understand what they're reading. Some 2,500 years after Plato's dialogues, a Canadian scholar named Marshall McLuhan said print is a "hot" medium for that reason. It requires some work, some mental exertion, some interactivity on the part of the reader. But TV, McLuhan added, is a "cool" medium. All we have to do is sit back, watch the pictures and listen to the audio -- we don't have to construct meaning like we do when we read. Cool. We just sit back and soak up the message when we watch TV.

For a Harvard prof, Dick Marius knew a lot about practical writing. He started as a teenage stringer for the twice-weekly paper in Lenoir City, Tenn., where people let him know about it "loudly and vehemently" if they "could not understand what I wrote about the garden club or high school commencement" (3). A Writer's Companion started as a handbook for writing students at Harvard, but some of Marius' advice for student writers can tell us a lot about the difference between print and electronic media:

The movies, radio, and television have inundated us with speaking by all sorts of people who might find it difficult to write an essay. We hear their words, their tones, and on TV talk shows see their carefully informal and humble grins. ... We are also accustomed to seeing speakers wander from one point to another, break off thoughts in midutterance, say confusing things, and contradict themselves. But we put up with such things on late-night talk shows, perhaps because we are looking at celebrities and they are amusing and perhaps because we don't have the energy late at night to do anything but sit there and look passively at the tube. (6-7)

We also put up with it because on TV, we have all the visual cues. As McLuhan would say, it's a "cool" medium. We don't have to work as hard to get meaning out of it, so we hardly work at all.

Print is a different kettle of fish altogether. Says Marius:

Writing and reading are far more demanding. Readers construct meanings from texts. Texts do not have body language and intonations. They stand alone. Writing represents more extended and more complicted thought than the though expressed in most conversations. The writer develops ideas in chains, one thought carefully linked to what has come before it, be aware what is there now, and anticipate what will come in the next paragraph or on the next page. Reading puts a strain on short-term memory ... (7)

One way of putting it is that we shift from print to electronic media, we are getting away from a written, inherently logical way of communicating and becoming more dependent on a more visual, emotional way of communicating. How does this affect society?

Works Cited
Marius, Richard. A Writer's Companion. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991.