The profusion of webcam interviews has had a democratizing effect that cuts both ways. On the one hand, the homemade, catch-as-catch-can interviews with doctors, nurses and E.M.S. workers on the front lines help to convey a sense of urgency; it’s the sort of gritty video we usually get only from reporters in war zones or families trying to ride out Category 5 hurricanes.

On the other hand, in a more subliminal way, the flattening of the journalistic curve may be muddling the message. When every medical expert looks no different from your garden-variety conspiracy theorist on the internet (or your Aunt Martha grappling with a FaceTime video call), the voices of authority become a little harder to distinguish, and to heed.

Yet to understand how the webcam is affecting our response to the pandemic, it helps to go back to Mr. McLuhan — that brilliant, sometimes confounding guru of the media age — and his famous distinction between “hot” and “cool” media. A “hot” medium (like movies or radio) delivers a high-definition sensory experience, allowing the user to simply sit back and absorb. Television, by contrast, is a “cool” medium; it delivers a comparatively low-definition image, and so requires more participation by the viewer to fill in the missing data and complete the picture.

It would be interesting to see how Mr. McLuhan would account for the changes in technology since the early 1960s, when he published his seminal work, “Understanding Media.” The 19-inch, black-and-white Sylvania has been replaced by a 58-inch, high-definition TV, which now delivers images not that far removed from what we see in the movie theater. The “cool” TV medium has heated up considerably and been succeeded by an even cooler medium, the internet.

Yet the Skypeing of TV news is, in terms of the sensory experience, a reversion to the television of an earlier era — the days of rabbit ears and fuzzy images, wavering signals and reaching for the vertical hold. And the upshot may be something like what Mr. McLuhan envisioned. “TV will not work as background,” he asserted. “It engages you. You have to be with it.”

We’re engaged now, of course, because we’re stuck in the house and inundated with scary images of what it means to go outside. But those crude, herky-jerky webcam interviews may be having a greater impact simply because they force the viewer to do some work: to complete the image, to decipher the audio, to participate in a way we don’t with the normal diet of slick cable-news interviews and round tables.

The webcam interview isn’t only affecting the message; it is demystifying the messenger. Familiar talking heads, forced out of the studio, now sit in their living room or home office (bookshelves usually behind them), blurrier and sounding like they’re inside an oil drum — but more relatable, like well-informed neighbors.