What would Marshall McLuhan think of Power Rangers?

When I was a kid in the 90's, at around 4pm all the kids that lived in my neighborhood would run home and plop in front of the television and watch Power Rangers. I on the other hand, usually could only watch the contents of PBS (like "Kratt's Creatures" and "Magic School Bus") and was even banned from watching "Sleeping Beauty" and "Lion King" because of content. But what if the content was removed entirely from these shows, and my mother/father looked at them with the magnifying glass of someone like Marshall McLuhan and judged purely on "the medium is the message"...would I still be banned from watching these shows as a child? Could my parent’s have made a judgment error when making me watch shows that were interestedly educational but had some other outlier that caused them to affect my behavior? For the most part these children’s shows acted as a hot medium, something that told me what to do and what to think. Did the Power Rangers allow other children to participate more in cognitive thought and become participatory watchers during their TV hour or was I really better off having information taught to me without any sort of participatory reaction, or is it inconsequential. What is the meaning of the medium, and how can it circumnavigate content altogether and find meaning in itself?
Marshall McLuhan's essay "Understanding Radio" really detaches itself from the discussion of content in media and rather looks at how it determines our behaviors and patterns. According to Federman, in What Is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message, McLuhan defines "medium" as "' any extension of ourselves'" (2). For McLuhan the medium exists in both "hot" and "cold", "hot" media being something that tells you what to believe or what to buy (like the QVC droning on about mint-green gardening capris), and "cold" media is something that requires one to think more and necessitates more participation. "TV is a cool medium." says McLuhan, "It rejects hot figures and hot issues and people from the hot press media...Radio, however, is a hot medium and takes cartoon characters seriously" (235). Radio, as McLuhan explains later, “…Is that extension of the nervous system that is matched only by human speech itself” (237) From this point of view not only does technology determine our behavior but it also can exist as an extension of our minds, our ears and our fingers--making it essential or quasi-essential to our senses, and even our sense of the world.
McLuhan gives various examples then to first show his point and then explain his main argument of "the medium is the message". One of the first examples he gives is the Kennedy-Nixon debates, at the high point of television audience, and how Kennedy mastered the cool TV medium, "It was Nixon's fate to provide a sharp, high-definition image and action for the cool TV medium that translated that sharp image into the impression of a phony"(235). For McLuhan it is understood that to look presidential and to look vital was the effect of television or as he will prove later, the message. Radio on the other hand does not allow the listener to decide, "radio affects most people intimately" says McLuhan, and then goes on to use the Orson Welles radio show hysteria as a precise instance of the hotness (or non-participatory nature) of this media (236). Where people able to look on the screen and see actual aliens, or to see Welles sitting there with his microphone making strange noises, or did they have to take what he said as real because there was no way to argue back or to deduce fact from fiction? Radio for teenagers (apparently in the 1950's-70's) have a different approach to radio according to McLuhan, "...To the teenager, the radio gives privacy, and at the same time provides the tight tribal bond of the world of common market...The ear is hyper esthetic [an abnormally acute sense of pain, heat, cold, or touch] compared to the neutral eye" (237).

McLuhan goes on to talk about his overall point in the latter half of his essay and draw mediums and their messages together. “Although medium is the message,” states McLuhan, “the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the “content,” which is always another medium.” (239). Content doesn’t matter to McLuhan, unlike the FCC or my parents, but instead the medium (which is another extension of our abilities) expatiates our behaviors and norms which in turn is the message itself. Federland explains this concept further by adding, “Thus we have the meaning of ‘the medium is the message:’ We can know of the nature and characteristics of anything we conceive or create (medium) by virtue of the changes—often unnoticed and non-obvious changes---that they effect (message)” (2). For McLuhan the meaning of the television is not the sitcoms we watch but the overall effect it may have that we had not previously noticed or taken into the equation. The television does not create violence by showing violent shows, but rather it creates focus by making our eyes coagulate the tiny pixels that make up the picture on the screen.

Did my parents have it all wrong then? Where they purely looking at the content without realizing that the medium itself is its own message? If they asked McLuhan he probably would have argued that watching Power Rangers was not itself a causation of violence in children, but perhaps the commercials that cut up the show were a perpetuation of non-focus. Perhaps that television is a “cool technology” and that it was really requiring more thought than that of a hot television show pounding hot information into my head. Regardless of this, my parents determined my usage of technology in a way that technology would not determine me. McLuhan may argue that content is inconsequential, but technology has an uncanny way of causing arousing certain behaviors in the psyche that seem to be determined by that technology. Did Power Rangers cause or spur on the violence of today’s young adults, or did television itself have a completely different effect regardless of content? Only time will tell, but McLuhan does make a compelling argument for technological determinism and the way we process and consume media.