3- How are portable media devices such as smart phones, iPods, and handheld

video games altering the media environment? How are these devices shaping
sensibilities?
Technological Determinism theory explains human behavior, stating the
prominent technologies in a given era determine social tendencies and
norms of culture. The media environment is always pouring information
into the population, drawing upon people’s senses, influencing their
habits and priorities. The content of the media, as well as the media
themselves, involve historical perceptions and technologies. Although
modern societies all share one physical world, individual civilizations
can occupy different realms of awareness. Marshall McLuhan describes
the contrasting hot and cold cultures and their interactions with hot and
cold medias.

Portable devices incorporate technology into human lives in new ways

older technologies never could. The invention of electricity amplified and
accelerated existing processes of human existence (McLuhan 24). Jobs,
tasks, and entertainments already present in human lives, were altered
with the advancements electricity made possible and available. Portable
devices allow a similar alteration to human processes, allowing
technology to extend and control human abilities. With media available
in our hands, people feel more connected to those media and
entertainment media is unleashed into every moment of our lives.

So what does this extension of media through mobile devices do to

culture? It alters senses, influences expression, and reshapes human
thinking. Whether these alterations are of positive or negative value is
not known, however it is known that their effects are apparent and
specific to this era.

Portable devices convey the media messages they’re programmed to

transmit (McLuhan 25). These instrumental (26) media are the
messengers of society, carrying those actions prompted by modern
media. These devices invite interaction and deliver media’s messages by
drawing the human senses that they’re deigned to attract. Smart phones,
PDA’s, and other cellular devices connected to the web, attract the
interests of users—appearing helpful for entertainment, information
gathering, and communication. Rather than experiencing reality first-
hand, humans are allowed to participate in interactions with their
devices to receive information and stimulation remotely, in high
definition. This is a hot culture.

Iimmediate, data-dense information and communication is appealing to a

person who is multi-tasking, uninformed, or without structured
organization. Hot mobile devices allow someone to retrieve specialized
information on the go. Without directions? Use a map App. Without
someone to talk to? No need to organize a gathering, send a mass text.
Need to know what type of light bulb for your vehicle? No need to find
the appropriate sections in the user-manual, Google it. People are not
forced to maintain contact with data sources or to plan ahead; they can
use their media devices to supplement what once required a specialist.

The media environment changes how people tackle their problems,

organize jobs, and socialize. These types of Cultural changes influence
media movements and technological evolution. In this way, the media
environment and culture work in ecology, influencing one another in
interrelated patterns and growth (27).

Media is nothing on its own without individuals and culture to utilize and
perpetuate the messages in media. Culture transmits the media, while
individuals receive it. All reality and media itself are complex, but the
effects of media and its messages received are simple on single planes
(39). The effects of devices in the media environment, not the media
itself, are made receivable to the beholder through an appeal to specific
senses. The senses targeted by mobile devices, mainly sight and touch,
are isolated and strengthened through repetitive use. A mobile device
designed to target sight and touch will alter human sense ratios (33) by
escalating the use and necessity of these senses in daily lives. This
alteration of sense ratios ultimately changes human ability to absorb
sensory data through the lesser-used senses.
In a media culture that emphasizes the senses of touch and sight, the
lesser- used senses become weakened and unpracticed. People
accustomed to texting will have quick motor movements in their
fingertips from repetitive use of the on-screen keypad, but what happens
to their penmanship? How experienced will they grow in areas of face-
to-face communication or composition? Will they be adequately
prepared to deal with real-time verbal and non-verbal communication?
An individual’s senses and fluency in various communication modes will
be altered by the media environment, and so will culture as a whole.

In a culture with specific senses emphasized and certain skills

underdeveloped, society will reinvent itself to accommodate modern
comfort levels.

McLuhan sees human comfort to rely on inviting, interactive media. A

cool medium is not dominant or overbearing (44) in contrast to high-
definition, hot media. A hot society that’s most comfortable with cool
media will not embrace mainstream, data-dense media, requiring
equilibrium to be reached in the media culture. This equilibrium may be
achieved by cooling off the media or by adjusting the acknowledgement
of the discomfort all-together. In a sense, disacknowledging the human
tendency to gravitate to the natural acquisition of cool medias, means
desensitizing ourselves to genuine learning, expression, and
communication.

Changing daily methods of learning, expression, and communication are

actually altering human thinking. Hot media such as portable devices,
perpetuate human tendencies to incompletely learn, and they express
and communicate using their media rather than themselves and one
another. In the absence of learning, a person will use their portable
devices to retrieve information on the spot, which will quickly be
forgotten. In the absence of genuine expression of emotion and
creativity, a person will re-share a meme, or use an emoticon in a digital
conversation. Communication itself becomes a digital fragment,
alienated from both the sender and receiver.
When people utilize their portable devices, they think they’re listening to
music, playing a game, learning, or having a conversation. The medium is
masked by the message they believe they are receiving from that
medium. When asked what someone is doing on their mobile phone, a
person can inaccurately say, “just talking with a friend,” a more accurate
response being, “Facebooking”.

Since when is Facebook a verb? This is an excellent example that the

medium is the message, and not the effect of the media once it enters the
receiver’s brain (or even the origin of the medium itself (McLuhan 31)).
Portable devices affect media culture by determining which senses
people use, what type of information is considered valuable, and how
individuals think on a daily basis. The value of these alterations is
rhetorical, but discrepancies between reality and media and the media
environment as a whole are indisputable.