International Journal of Communication, 8: Special Section: Media, Hot and Cold (2014)

“The 21st century will be the century of temperature. As global temperatures rise, polar ice melts, and drought becomes a permanent way of life, temperature has become the single greatest challenge to human life on the planet.

Temperature is also a media problem in many ways: from the heat generated by new media—whether in our hands or in giant server farms; to the technologies used to measure, represent, and understand temperature; to the contribution of new media systems themselves to the problem of global warming. But this is not a new phenomenon. For centuries, media and mediation have been at the center of experiments in and beliefs about temperature and its relation to culture, gender, language, and life. In this special section, we take the 50th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media literally to ask “What are hot and cold media?””

Contributors: Alice Christensen, Wolfgang Ernst, Brenton J. Malin, Jessica Mudry, Dylan Mulvin, Lisa Parks, Rafico Ruiz, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, Marita Sturken.

Special section of the IJoC 8
Edited by Dylan Mulvin and Jonathan Sterne
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND License
ISSN 1932-8036
44 pages

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