Chinua Achebe - Also a "Cool" Medium

John Walter wrote a blog post online just here recently defining hot and cool mediums. According to Walter, a hot medium can be defined as something that gives you a lot of information, but not much to do with it. A hot medium simply just makes you absorb all of the information that is thrown at you. A cool medium is something that give you just enough information to fill in the missing pieces. According to Walter's blog post, print is a medium that is a hot medium and all you have to do is take in all of the information that you are reading. However, I believe that there are instances as to where a print can actually be a cool medium as well.

Any book can be made into a cool medium by the reader when they do more than simply just read the book. For example, if someone were to just read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe they most likely would not understand or realize the underlying themes of the book. The reader has to make a conscious effort to think about the themes of masculinity and how language expresses culture, Achebe doesn't spell those things out for us in the book. I believe that mediums are what you put into them. An author puts a lot of information into the reader's brain to make the plot interesting but the reader has to work with the information that they are given to find what message the author was going for.

Not only that, Things Fall Apart have sparked some really interesting conversations in class. If we were simply to just absorb the information in the book, we wouldn't have had these additional, collegiate conversations. Since we are doing extra work with the information that we are given, our class is transforming what Walter classifies as a hot medium into a cool medium.

It totally makes sense as to where Walter was coming from, but I believe that with books like Things Fall Apart, you can't classify whether a medium is hot or cool until after the audience has done something with it. Walter's generalizations are a good platform to start with when someone is classifying mediums, but there are a lot of factors that can alter the final classification.