Medium & Media

Etymology: medium
Analogue: Medi-Terranean sea = "sea between lands"

Singular and plural

• Medium (singular)
Something that carries or contains content in the middle or between.
• Media (plural)
=> What's wrong?
• "Mass media is dead."
• "Interactive medias are cool."

Physical and technical media

Carrier or container (of information, messages, data). optical disc, hard disk, paper, magnetic tape etc.

Analog media

• Analog media
Quantity represents expression.

Digital media

• Digital media
• Digital technology
Everything breaken to expressions with 1 and 1.
Digital world model: Everything being translated to digital expression.
BUT also the core coding of the neural system is digital: Axon's either fire or don't fire!

• Axon

Media as means and systems

• radio
• television
• press
• Internet
• speech
...
• "The media have created this figure."

Humans as media

• "We the media" (Gilmor 2004)
• Spritual medium, "person who conveys spiritual [God's] messages"

Broadened senses

• technology
• extensions of man
• environments of mediation

Mass media

• radio
• television
• press
• Internet 1.0
• Relation of art and mass media;
• Walter Benjamin (1936) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
=> Set the tune of modern media discourse and grounds the concept of new media
• Discourses

Multimedia

• Multimedia
Hypertextual media combining text, images, audio and video. (Not necessarily social or community aspects Web 2.0).

New media

• New media
Avantgarde: New at any given moment
Relates often to media arts.
Postmodern interpretation: Something new after "modern" media.

Hypertext

• Definitions of hypertext
Direct linking to source or deepening knowledge by clicking, the defining characteristic of the Internet.
• History of the Internet (video 8 min)
• Memex (Vannevar Bush)
Analogue betwee academic reference culture and hypertext.
• Hypercard

Internet (Web 1.0)

• Internet

Interactive media

• Interactive media
What sense of interaction is referred to (last time)?
OUR sense: Media with actual two-way systemic interaction, complex system interaction.

Social Internet (2.0)

Web 1.0 enhanced with:
• social,
• community,
• collaborative, and
• participatory
...functions.
Real interactive media (see earlier discussion).

Medium and message

Dichotomy between medium and message questioned by McLuhan: "Medium is the message" :
The form of the medium is more significant than its contents.
The medium itself carries meanings.
=> Media art
=> More holistic understanding instead of the mechanistic and dualistic view.
• Medium is the massage(?!)
Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist => See literature list

To mediate

• To assume a position between
• To interact between

Mediate what?

• Message
• Content
• Meaning
• Ontology
• Understanding
• Identity

Local and global media

• Local media
• Globalization of media with the Internet

Assignment

Orient to the literature

For tomorrow, find an article on "Interactive media" or "Interaction design" and read for next time (1/10) from:
• IMKE library
• ESTER
• Google Scholar

Visit

• Visit to the IMKE library
• Visit to the Tallinn university study library