> Instagram: warm. The main content being communicated is all visual, and you don’t need to understand genre conventions as much. Instagram in its early photo f

> Instagram: warm. The main content being communicated is all visual, and you don’t need to understand genre conventions as much. Instagram in its early photo filter days was fairly hot media, as is classic photography, but it cooled down when it became the de facto social status app. Now there’s interplay between what’s posted and how many likes it gets, and from whom, and other social dynamics like private versus public posting. There is still some ambiguity, but as a medium it’s more information-complete than Twitter or texting. I just can't get behind this. Instagram, to my eye, conveys very little novel information. I tried it for a bit, but found myself gravitating to screenshots of Twitter, and other text. Photographs don't, to my thinking, convey much information. Instead, perhaps, they inspire recollection. They are a cool medium, and I think Susan Sontag's theory in e.g. "Regarding the Pain of Others" reflects this. If the image can be _used_ by politically cynical agents to achieve polar-opposite propaganda goals, then what information does the image inherently carry? Little. > Cool sensory perception and cool media are low in engagement but high in participation. We are operating in gap-filling mode: doing relatively little engagement with the media (we’re only pulling in a low-resolution sample) but a lot of participation with the media (we’re actively filling in the gaps ourselves, and operating in feed-forward mode). I struggle with the attempt to juxtapose, as opposites, the near-synonyms of "engagement" and "participation."