The medium is the message”
Marshall McLuhan
McLuhan claimed in Understanding Media that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it. So the medium through which a person encounters a particular piece of content would have an effect on the individual’s understanding of it. Some media, like movies, enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image. McLuhan contrasted this with TV, which he claimed requires more effort on the part of viewer to determine meaning, and comics, which due to their minimal presentation of visual detail require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be “hot” (intensifying one single sense) and “high definition” (demanding a viewer’s attention), and a comic book to be “cool” and “low definition” (requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value). This concentration on the medium and how it conveys information — rather than on the specific content of the information — is the focal point of “the medium is the message.”
(From Wikipedia)
