Queen Bee

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.