Chapter 13 begins with Rice associating cool with technology. Hewlett-Packard has envisioned our future as Cooltown. Cooltown is a place where everything in life is intermingled with technology. There are two basic terms on this website relevant to our own idea of cool writing, mobility and interlinking of distinct activities. The vision of cool from Hewlett-Packard stems form media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s work (136). In his book Understanding Media, he divides media into hot and cool. Hot media are media with high definition that require little participation by viewers or readers in order to understand the content’s meaning (i.e. movies)(137). Cool media on the other hand is that of low definition and it requires extensive participation (i.e. talking on the phone)(137). The concept to grasp here is that cool media requires us to see all ideas as interlinked, and the interlinking creates cool writing.
Within the example of Cooltown, we can see how easily commercialism and technology are so easily intertwined. Another example is a movie. Within a movie, countless products are marketed to a large audience. Besides the revenue potential of the movie itself and the products its marketing, other related products (books and toys) create additional revenue too. Rice also challenges us to become intelligent consumers and recognize these marketing methods and how frequently they confront us. Another example of a tie-in is Absolut, who creates games for its visitors to play, of course the real reason they created the game was to sell more Vodka, not to entertain. Although it is not necessary for cool writing to be tied into commercialism, it is an easy way to prove that interlinking between any two topics should not prove to be any great feat.
Chapter 14 focuses on Cyberculture. In cyberculture, the medium of the web interlinks a vast amount of material, typically unrelated yet represented through Web pages (144). Cyberculture obtains different meanings for different people. There are however four common descriptors, futuristic, building upon old forms, interconnected, and often strange and unsettling when first introduced. Cyberspace (the name of the cyberculture medium), “creates an imaginary place where its participants believe they are experiencing reality, when in fact they may or may not be doing so”(145). Rice continues on in the chapter and speaks of hypertext as the way of communication through cyberspace.
