From Talmud folios to Web sites: HOT pages, COOL pages, and the information plenum

Home pages and Web sites remind us that once, before the printed page was HOT in the McLuhan (1965) sense, there were also COOL, nonlinear, interactive pages. Interfaces and Web pages resemble Talmud folios in interesting ways. Moreover, HOT pages and COOL pages represent competing notions of communication: the Hellenistic model, in which the world is an information vacuum to be filled by the communicator, and the Talmudic model, in which the world is an information plenum, absolutely full of knowledge and requiring guides and navigators.