The diagnostic mastications concentrated on CEO musical chairs, technology gaps, cosmic burnrates, and the failure of these dotcoms to create breakout stars with mainstream media acceptance. The problems with DEN and Pseudo were business problems, squawked the vultures, but a Web-based television network with a proper business model would work just fine. In his overcited but ultimately underread text Understanding Media , McLuhan devised a relative scale of media heat. Hot media are those that provide high-definition information to a single sense. Radio is hot, because it pours crystal-clear data into the ears.
Cool media are less intense, but appeal to more senses.
Television, which engages the eyes with constantly redrawn, dim images and the ears with tinny audio, is cool. Yet in the polar regions of the Internet, where viewers are apt to be doing five things at once rather than leaning toward the speaker to hear a news bulletin, even icy webcasts are too hot. DEN and Pseudo were hardly the first to get stung by doomed attempts to mix hot media with cool. Designed to carry hot images, mechanical televisions were themselves cooler than cathode-ray televisions too cool, in fact, to survive. Resolution was terrible, with many sets drawing a picture comprising fewer than 50 lines.