The Final Countdown (Do do do dooo, do do do do dooo)

For my final blog, I think it's time to put things in perspective a bit. Rather than linking to this or that, I think it's time to just take time to speak my mind. I think we might have been a bit too kind to McLuhan. Yes, he had the imagination to foresee where the media world was headed, but the idea of hot vs. cold has become antiquated. I don't think the whole idea of media you spend more time with vs. media you don't spend as much time with really applies anymore. To me, there is the Internet vs. everything else at this point. The Internet has so many different sources at the user's disposal-- it's not as cut and dry as the written in paper articles of your newspaper or the broadcasts on your tv or radio, but instead you have both of those incorporated to the net, and literally thousands of news sites to choose from. If I use hot and cold in the sense that I imagine them, the information that is simply fed to you (tv, newspaper) is cold in that it solely relays the message, and there really are a limited number of options-- local stations/papers or the major global ones. The hot media form is obviously the Internet, because not only are you in control of which site you choose to be informed by, but the user can actually participate in the news media just as much. Whether through blogging, tweeting traffic updates (which can be used to update this ct.gov traffic site apparently), or in the real life example we saw of someone updating a Facebook status to mourn the loss of Patrick Swayze, there is nothing so live, so immediate, and so easy that remotely compares to the Internet. I am not blaming McLuhan for anything, or saying that his incredible foresight should be mocked, but to me, everything we've seen in the class through examples of social networking and even wikipedia, this interactivity and almost overload of accessibility and information brings us beyond examples of hot and cold media.