Marshal McLuhan referred to television as a “cool” medium. By this he did not mean that it is not exciting. He meant that it leaves out a great deal, forcing the viewer to actively supply or invent things in order to make TV’s narrative work, as opposed to reading, which he perceived as supplying everything and leaving less to the imagination. This is not intuitively obvious usage in 2015. McLuhan (BBC, 1965) explained that he was following the slang of the day, in which “cool” meant what the previous generation meant by “heated”.

Accepting this terminology, it’s interesting to speculate about how McLuhan would have classified Facebook and its siblings in social media. They’re certainly low-bandwidth compared to television, at least superficially. Other people are mostly represented by relatively short texts and a few still images. I don’t know of many people who would call online interactions (as a whole) “uninvolving,” certainly.

Watching a Facebook commercial (video ad) after reviewing McLuhan was interesting. I want to extend my analysis to the commercial as well as Facebook itself. The ad is distinguished by conscious simplicity. There are no scene-to-scene transitions. There are no special effects. The music never seems to have more than 3 instruments playing, and often only one. Many scenes have only one or no actors–a few are just still life. Is the ad “cool” or “hot”? The rapid scene changes (scenes average less than one second) don’t tell a story in any overt way. There are no continuing characters, even in a 90 second ad. If “coolness” is defined as involving the audience member by leaving out information, this ad is very cool.

What’s fascinating to me as I analyze the thing is that it has almost nothing in common with Facebook, at least superficially. Facebook is almost all textual. About 10 words of text appear during the commercial. Facebook doesn’t have a narrator. Facebook doesn’t have a musical score. Facebook does have still images, the ad does not. Even the still-life scenes tend to have a subtle pan to them. They are not totally still.

On a deeper level, though, there are (pun intended) links to Facebook. The cast is multinational. The “topic” of each scene can either directly follow from the last one, or be completely unrelated. The narration is all about human connections and the repelling of loneliness, surely the central theme of Facebook.

I’m sure this was unintentional, but there are no close-ups in the ad. I see this as a representation of the fact that Facebook communication will rarely or never produce the degree of intimacy one can obtain in face-to-face or even telephone interactions.

One could also analyze the advert as an attempt to promote a “new medium” (to quote both McLuhan and the course title) using an older one (although calling TV “old” is strange in the context of 10,000 years of history, especially considering that TV itself is constantly changing). I find it interesting how completely the ad refused to use the standard format for advertising. It doesn’t mention a single product feature. There’s no price info. They don’t caricature the competition. They don’t talk to a satisfied customer or an actor playing an authority figure. It’s just a somewhat bland short film that would be an interesting project for a graduate student in film studies, but has very little in common with ordinary product ads.

British Broadcasting Corporation (Producer). (1965). Monitor [Video file]. Retrieved from
http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/sayings/1965-hot-and-cool-media/