While many of us today vaguely share this impression of loss of depth, warmth and proximity (a loss said to be caused by the digitalizing of media), it is difficult to view the matter from a distance and study it scientifically when the question is sometimes tinged with nostalgia or a fear of change. All the more so in that, even when one adopts the point of view of users, these orientations or “colourations” tied to the ontology of the transmission material are not always perceived. Recall in this respect the sometimes unconvincing contortions engaged in by Marshall McLuhan to explain how for him television was a cold medium which, according to his definition, encouraged participation in the medium. For McLuhan, the myriad of points that the viewer must recombine, without knowing it, in order to have access to the image transmitted on his or her small domestic screen, fit this criterion for participation. Associated in this way with the television viewer’s unconscious perception alone, the “participative coldness” defined by McLuhan aroused controversy. We might also wonder whether this “ontological” way of interpreting the digital image’s coldness-without-duration is not open to a critique of the same order as that levelled against McLuhan with respect to television. We might ask in passing, if the reader agrees to shift the conceptual field a smidgen, the following seemingly peculiar question: does the digital not also function, in its own way, as a technological ersatz of McLuhan’s television viewer, given that it carries out for us the synthesis and reconstruction of the digitized image we see?