The distinction between hot and cool media is as central in the work of McLuhan as it is controversial. It is controversial to what extent it can be applied meaningfully, as can already be observed in the early debates about the cool status of TV. But the distinction is central to his work, since it is concerned with the notion of involvement, a notion that allows McLuhan to address the moral dimension of his narrative about the history of media. No matter how often we find the refusal of moral judgements about technology in McLuhan's rhetoric, his regret about the detachment and loss of involvement brought about by alphabetic writing and print, as well as his hope that electric media would retrieve intimacy and involvement, are clearly ethical concerns.

The first section of this chapter (pp. 22–3) tries to expose this ethical background in order to make the analytic aim of the hot/cool distinction more transparent. However, the contestable ways in which McLuhan applies this distinction to concrete media reveals an ambiguity within his ethically charged concept of involvement. The second section (pp. 24–5) addresses Friedrich Kittler in order to settle this conceptual shortage. The distinction between symbolic and technological media can be considered to be as central in Kittler as the hot/cool distinction is in McLuhan.