60% down the page: We aren’t really used to that exchange onscreen. “A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition,’ ” Marshall McLuhan wrote in his famous, meandering study of different media forms. “Hot media are, therefore, low in participation and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.” Slow TV is high-definition in its visual information, yet it gets its meaning from viewers’ imaginative consciousness. As entertainment, it is backward: it appears to do its job by casting viewers into their own minds.
To try to understand, I replaced consciousness with the linked definition 2: imaginative awareness/perception. Yet how does this differ from simply 'imagination'? I contend with these abstract terms/notions. What does the bolded mean here?