This past December
Christmas came about ten days early for me, all because Beyoncé released her
newest self-titled album BEYONCE. This album is a lot different from the
average album artists put out. I consider this album to be both a hot and cool
media. This album doesn’t necessarily fit into what McLuhan would consider a
hot media because it is a visual album and it is engaging in more than one
sense but, the way he describes television as a cool media forces me to put it into the category of a hot media. In the book it says “television
did not spell out every detail, it is argued, leaving audiences more able to
fill in the gaps themselves.” In the documentary going behind the scenes of Beyoncé’s
new album she says, “I wanted people to hear the songs with the story that’s in
my head” therefore she is leaving no gaps to be filled. With the definition of
hot media in the book being “high-definition and data intensive with a large amount
of information, conveyed usually to a single one of the human senses” it’s hard
to not put this visual album in that category. There is so much detail put into
the seventeen music videos on this visual album that just pulls every song together
and creates one big story.
This new album wasn’t
only different in the fact that it was visual album it was different in how it
was released. There was no warning, Beyoncé just released it. Nobody knew it
was coming out, literally everyone just woke up the next day with twitter and
every social media site going crazy about this new album Beyonce released while
everyone was sleeping. She relied heavily on technology. If this album was
released how it was before technology, she would have never seen the numbers she
did in the first few days. Like the book says “as the web was further developed
and broadband introduced, it became feasible to upload or download high
quantities of dense multimedia content, such as music and video files, as well
as text and still images.” This album was only available on iTunes for digital
download, you couldn't get it in any store, some won’t ever carry it either.
Without the advancement in technology she wouldn't have been able to surprise
all of her fans with an album like this and be successful. Part of the reason
for that is also because “the internet for the first time introduced the
possibility of interactive mass communication.”
like I said before this album was all over social media. It had no singles
leading up to it, she relied on word of mouth and the internet to get the
numbers she did. She has set the bar high for artists living in this world of
technology that we live in.
