Chapter 3: Media
In this chapter, we discuss media, another foundational concept for message processing. First, to more clearly define the role of media in the process of human communication, we offer a definition of the term “medium”, and discuss the functions media serve. We then look at affordances of the different media systems, highlighting how media differ and are similar to one another, and the implications of media system use and choice for message processing.
In this chapter, we continue our discussion of foundational concepts for message processing, focusing on media. The aim of this, and our discussion of fundamental concepts more generally, is twofold. First, we are laying the conceptual groundwork for our study of message processing. In so doing, we also aim to help you see elements of the world around you from a new perspective. Second, and related, systematically examining these concepts gives us insight into how both objects and contexts that might seem unrelated actually share common properties and roles with respect to human communication. A piece of paper, a computer hard drive, and the wall of a building might initially seem to have little in common, but they can all fulfill the same function as an interface medium for written communication. By the end of this chapter, you should have a better idea of key similarities and differences across different forms of media, and how they are relevant to message processing.
Defining “Media”
In theory, research, and everyday discussions of communication, we often see and hear the term “media” used in variety of different ways and forms. Popular communication and cultural studies refer to “the media” when talking about the entire broadcasting industry. Likewise, journalism – whether print, radio, or televised – is often referred to as “the media” or more recently “mainstream media.” An extremely common term in research and popular culture is “computer-mediated communication.” In the arts community, a primary question you might ask a new artist friend is “What medium [singular of “media”] do you work in?” When communication researchers compare different forms of communication, they sometimes claim that nonverbal communication is more “immediate” that verbal communication because the latter is more “cognitively mediated.” In statistics, we might point out that the apparent relationship between two variables is actually “mediated” by a third variable.
Clearly media is a useful and versatile term for us, and important to the study of communication. However, using this term so widely to refer to so many different things makes it difficult to tell what “media” actually is, and the role in plays in communication. For example, most researchers and scholars refer to communicative behavior that employs information or communication technologies as mediated communication. Does that indicate communication without such technologies, i.e., face-to-face (FtF) communication, is unmediated communication? (The answer, we will argue, is no.) To address issues such as these, we need a definition of “media”.
For the purposes of studying message processing, we offer the following as a definition of medium (plural, media):
A medium is any material or portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that can be systematically altered by a communicator with sufficient stability to (a) preserve stimuli for purposes of distributing and storing messages, or (b) cast stimuli into the proximal environment of another communicator for purposes of interfacing with messages.
This definition is, on a fundamental level, consistent with the Latin origins of the word, which designate something “in the middle” or between two (or more) things. Here, a medium is the physical substance “in the middle” between two or more communicators, through which they communicate.
With that said, it is important to recognize that medium in and of itself does not necessarily have communicative value. For instance, a blank white sheet of paper has the capacity to serve as a medium. In its blank state, it has qualities to which we can assign values: we could measure its size, the weight of the paper, its opacity or reflectivity – but its communicative value is still only potential. A medium has to be altered in some systematic fashion to create a media system. Thus, the moment we make a mark on that blank paper with pencil (which is another medium), we create a media system. We also could raise bumps on that blank paper – as with the Braille communicative system – and create an effective media system with just the single medium. In each of these situations we have the basic components for a media system: a constant background and a variable foreground. It is the systematic altering of a constant with a variable that allows a medium or media to have communicative value.
All media systems function as variable foregrounds on constant backgrounds. When we speak we disrupt the relatively constant air pressure with variability caused by our voices. The vinyl 33 rpm records of the mid-20th century were a media system consisting of a constant surface made variable by spirals of grooves in the disk’s surface. Likewise, our more current CDs and DVD consist of constant plastic surfaces with very fine pits systematically burned into those surfaces. We can use a stick to make grooves and divots in a uniform dirt or sand surface to draw maps or write words. A painting is a blank canvas with a systematic application of paints to depict images. Even a skywriting plane creates a media system by leaving a systematic exhaust trail spelling out words against the constant background of the sky. Fiber optic and copper cables function as media systems via the systematic pulsing of light or electricity through the constant state of the cables. Radio and television transmitters create media systems by systematic pulsing of specific bandwidths of electromagnetic radiation against the relative constancy of background radiation.
Thus, systematically altering a medium is the means by which communicators can access and create (i.e., observe or exhibit) stimuli intended for other communicators. From this follows an important point: communication always requires a medium. As discussed in our message processing definition of communication (see Chapter 2), communicators must employ stimuli to activate, create, or ascertain other communicators’ meme states, because people do not have direct access to other people’s minds. The only access we have to others’ minds is through their brains, and the only access we have to their brain is through their senses. Systematic alterations of media are the means through which we can access others’ senses. If we do not have a medium, we have no way to access others’ senses. Thus, we need a medium to communicate.
Functions of Media
Beyond the observation that communication requires a medium, what role do media play in message processing? To address this question, we might ask another: What do people refer to when they use the term “media”? A partial answer is that people use the term “media” or “mediate” in reference to messages. Frequently, it is used to address how a message gets presented to us or how a message moves from one communicator to another. More specifically, as our definition above suggests, media serve two primary functions: they allow people to interface with messages, and to distribute or transport messages across time and space.
Media as Sensory Interface
If you do not have access to another’s senses, then you cannot communicate with that person. A medium provides access to their senses. When we gesture, we use light (more specifically, photons) as a medium. The ambient light reflects off our body, and stimulates rods and cones in another person’s eyes. When we write a letter to a friend, we employ ink and paper as media; this ultimately relies on light to reach our recipient’s senses as well. Prisoners in separate cells who tap the bars or the wall to communicate with fellow prisoners also use the air as medium.
A commonality across all of the examples above is that we are using a medium or media system to interact with another’s senses. This use of media suggests that a primary function of media is sensory access to messages, or what we refer to as interfacing with messages. When we wish to activate memes in another communicator’s mind, we structure stimuli in some fashion (i.e., construct a message; see Chapter 2) and present it to that other’s senses. It is through the process of systematically altering a medium—which has a physical form—that we create messages in a form that another communicator can access via his or her senses.
Messages often arrive to us in a format that we cannot directly use. A land line telephone call arrives as electric pulses across a copper wire or a fiber. Cellular phone calls reach our cell phones as radio waves, the same way they reach our wireless receivers in our computers. These various electric and optical pulses carry enormous amounts of data – in other words, messages – but we do not have access to these messages until they translated into sonic waves accessible by our ears or light waves accessible to our eyes. These messages must be converted from analog and digital data streams to those subsets of energy from which our (first order) senses can sample.
In thinking about this process, it is important to remember that what is experienced as “direct” interaction with the world is always and only experienced through our senses. Our senses sample from the world external to us and that sampling – through touch, vision, hearing, smell, and taste – only corresponds to what we those senses are able to perceive. Vast portions of the world external to our bodies (e.g., x-rays, infrared light, ultrasonic frequencies) are unavailable to our conscious experiences due to the limitations of our sensory apparatus.
We can think about our senses – the senses we came into the world with – as first order sensory technology. With the help of second-order sensory technology, we can restore damaged first order sensory technology to its initial or “normal” state: glasses, contact lenses, and hearing aids are all examples of this. For hundreds of years, people have also been developing third order sensory technology, or technologies that augment or amplify our senses beyond their normal capabilities. Examples of these include microscopes, binoculars, and telescopes; or glasses/goggles that sample from electromagnetic spectra not visible to our unaided eyes, allowing us to see in the dark or see infrared radiation. Optical aids such as Google glasses, which allow us to see all sorts of digital information overlaid on our field of vision, are also examples of this. For our purposes, we consider anything accessing and/or accessible to our senses—regardless of the technology used to have this experience—a medium or media system functioning as a sensory interface.
Media as Distributors of Messages
When we communicate, our goal is generally to move messages from one place to another. It might be one person’s mouth to another’s ears. It might be from a television station to your home television. It can be from your cell phone to another’s cell phone. It can be from the author of a book to her thousands of readers. In the process of moving from Point A to Point B, a message might undergo one or more transformations in form or format (a point we will return to in discussing codes; see Chapter 4) to make the trip across space and/or time. When you speak to your friend, it is not words that reach his or her ears, but rather compressions and rarefications of air, which will hit and vibrate his or her eardrum. This, in turn, will create neural impulses that are carried to his or her brain, which will ultimately translate those signals into words. When you make a cell phone call, the words you speak into my phone undergo multiple transformations into different types of digital signals before emanating as a facsimile of your voice from the speaker on your friend’s phone. In all of these instances media – air, electricity, radio waves, microwaves – are used to move or distribute the message from one communicator to another.
Thus, in addition to allowing access to stimuli in a single time and place (i.e., an interface function), media systems also allow us to move the message from Point A to Point B, or from Time 1 to Time 2. We refer to this function as distribution of messages—that is, transmitting messages across space and time. The latter function (i.e., relating to time) can also be thought about as message preservation or storage.
Conduit media
How we use media systems to distribute messages is not a singular process; different media do this in different ways. Some media – air, electricity, light – serve as conduit for message distribution. A conduit is akin to a channel or a pipe, through which a substance travels. When a medium operates as a conduit, the medium does not move but the message moves within the medium, like water moves through plumbing. In “land line” phones our voices are converted to electric signals that traverse copper cables before arriving at another phone. Cable television makes use of copper cable and fiber optic networks to distribute electric signals and pulsed light waves to homes and businesses around the country. And when we speak with each other we make use of the air and light in the room to serve the very same function that copper cables serve with phone calls. In all these cases the medium employed – air, light, copper cable, fiber optic cable – is serving as conduit to distribute the message.
Carrier media
We can also distribute a message by putting it on some kind of durable substance – for example, paper, plastic, magnetized metal oxides, silicon, wood, even stone – and then move that substance from Point A to Point B. In this case, the substance is our medium, and it is operating as a carrier—that is, something that physically carries a message. Mail in your mailbox, physical books, vinyl records, and digital game cartridges or discs are all examples of carrier media. In all of these cases the message has been recorded on a physical medium and that medium has made a trek – via planes, boats, trucks – to its destination. This, too, is a form of message distribution (and one which is potentially costly, as we will discuss later).
Media Affordances
Seeing what all media systems have in common—that is, they consist of a variable foreground on a constant background, and are used to distribute and/or interface with messages—the next question one could ask is: how do media systems vary? More specifically, can we describe media systems using a set of criteria that would allow us to compare and contrast different media systems? Doing so would be useful for at least two reasons. First, it would allow us to determine the assets and liabilities of each media system, which could help us see why some media systems are best suited for some communicative jobs relative to others. Second, this would help us see the continuity across media systems that might otherwise appear to be quite different. In this section, we discuss these criteria in the form of media system affordances.
The term affordances refers to capacities of a technology that make that technology useful to its users. For example, some of the affordances we could consider for technologies designed to move people across space (e.g., cars, skateboards, bicycles, automobiles, Segways, buses, airplanes, etc.) could include speed, passenger capacity, safety, manner of propulsion, energy efficiency, and expense. We can describe anything in that category, from a skateboard to a space capsule, in terms of these capacities, or affordances.
What affordances apply to different media systems? In what follows, we will seek to answer this question in terms of the two functions of media discussed above. First, we will consider those that relate to message distribution (i.e., moving messages from Point A to Point B); second, we will consider those that relate to interfacing with messages (i.e., allowing communicators to access to messages).
Affordances Related to Message Distribution
There are multiple affordances that we can use to examine differences in how media systems distribute messages. Among these are the following:
Carrying Capacity
Carrying capacity (often referred to as bandwidth for conduit media systems) refers to the message load that a media system can handle per unit of time. Since the Internet emerged as a public phenomenon in the 1990s, we have seen continual growth in its capacity to carry more data in less time. As the Internet grew from a copper cable-based system to one including higher capacity glass fiber optic cables, more and more data could be moved in less and less time. In the 1990s a single web page of text might take minutes to load on a screen; today we stream high definition movies in seconds. Just as we can describe the carrying capacity of cables, we can also describe the carrying capacity of other conduit media such as air, microwave radiation, and AM and FM radio waves. We can even assign a value to the carrying capacity of the bones in our head (as used in e.g., bone conductive headphones). All can be compared and contrasted in terms of how much stimuli they can hold and move per unit of time.
Similarly, we can describe the carrying capacity of carrier media systems, such as paper, CDs, DVDs, flash drives, or stone tablets. Intuition tells us that paper can carries significantly less stimuli than a DVD or a flash drive (and a stone tablet, even less!) relative to the other media in the list. However, comparing all these media in terms of this affordance shows us that the function of paper is fundamentally no different than the function of CDs and flash drives: they all have the capacity to record a message and move that message from Point A to Point B.
Message Durability
In order to carry a message, a media system must provide some degree of stability over time for that message. Copper and fiber optic cables allow some message stability but, as with many conduit media, message stability and message integrity are lost over large distances. In the same way that our unassisted voice can only carry so far through the air, the electric or light pulses traveling through cables will often degrade as they traverse longer distances. In general, conduit media systems only allow limited message durability. Without some form of augmentation, messages traveling through conduit media degrade. In everyday life, systems are engineered to compensate for this issue with the help of technology. We can augment our voice with microphones and (audio) speakers to amplify and distribute our voice over larger distances. Copper and fiber optic cables use periodically spaced repeaters and amplifiers to help messages reach intended audiences.
Carrier media systems generally have better message durability than conduit media systems. Messages recorded on stone tablets, paper, magnetic strips, plastic discs, silicon transistors are considerably more durable than messages traversing conduit media. If we want our messages to last weeks, months, years, centuries then we strategically select from among various carrier media systems to meet those durability needs. However, durability tends to come at other costs.
Message Distribution Speed
Media systems can also be compared and contrasted in terms of how quickly they allow us to distribute a message. On this criterion, conduit media have a clear advantage over carrier media systems. Speaking through air, we can distribute a message at approximately 340 meters per second (about 767 mph—i.e., the speed of sound). Using our land line phones or our cell phones, we can speak with somebody across the country with no discernable delay. Digital signals across cable/fiber optic networks are measured in megabits per second and can range from 1 Mbit/sec to over 100 Mbit/sec. Wireless technology (and software systems that support it) have progressed to the point that we can stream high definition movies to our TVs and watch them as they are streaming.
In carrier media systems, in contrast, messages are integrated with a media system; this means the media systems must be physically transported for the message to be distributed. More or less all forms of physical transportation and delivery – e.g., foot, road, rail, air transport, ships – are orders of magnitude slower than delivery via conduit media systems; often, they are also more expensive. Further, each instance of a message distributed via a carrier media system must be recorded on a corresponding physical media system. That means a physical book destined to reach a thousand people requires a thousand individual, printed copies of that book to be distributed. A digital version of that same book can be distributed across a conduit media system to reach those same thousand people much more rapidly.
Source Control Over Message Casting
For both conduit and carrier media systems, we can also consider how much control a message source as over how they distribute a message. When you speak to an individual person, anybody in the vicinity of your voice can listen. Your voice is broadcast, albeit not a great distance. The television system in the second half of the 20th century was also a broadcast system: television programs were blasted out in all directions – broadcast – for anybody with a receiver (i.e., antenna, attached to their TV) to watch. Because television producers could not control who could watch their shows, they could not charge their audience for watching their shows. It became necessary to fund their programming by attracting sponsors who would pay for the programming in exchange for promoting their products to viewers—and this is the origin of commercials on television.
Telephony uses a different message distribution model. Even the earliest phones were designed to target (only approximately in the early days) an individual receiver: calls went from one phone to another only; they were not broadcast for just anyone to pick up. Likewise, a letter sent through the US Postal service, an email message, and a text message all target specific individuals with little effort or expense on the part of a message source.
As these examples demonstrate, media systems can vary in how narrowly or broadly they can “cast” their message(s). Some systems, like speech, radio, and broadcast television, send messages out into space where anybody with appropriate reception technology (e.g., ears, antennae, dish antennae) can collect those messages. Likewise, media systems vary significantly in the ease and expense with which they can distribute their messages.
The internet forever changed how easily and inexpensively we could distribute message to individual targets. Among other outcomes, this resulted in the greatest increase in spam—i.e., unsolicited messages—that we have ever experienced. Prior to the internet, spamming somebody was fairly difficult and expensive. Each household might have had a separate, targetable address, but acquiring that information and using that information was cumbersome, and a sender had to pay for each letter or postcard they sent (because postal mail is a carrier media system). If you wished to reach a few million people (e.g., with a fabricated story from a foreign bank officer who wished to send a million dollars for safekeeping), you had to print a million separate letters to be placed into a million envelopes, labeled with accurate addresses that you somehow acquired, and then pay for postage. With the Internet, reaching a million people is much easier and cheaper: you can easily acquire a million email addresses, and you only need write and send your scam email a single time– with the push of a button – at almost no cost to you. It has been estimated that as much as 80% of email flying around the ether is some sort of spam, thankfully intercepted largely by our spam blockers.
Affordances Related to Message Interface
There are also multiple affordances that we can use to examine differences in how media systems give us access to messages. These affordances include:
Available Modalities
Any given interface media system is designed to allow access to stimuli by one or more senses, or sensory modalities. We can compare and contrast different media systems in terms of which, and how many, modalities they use. Television, cinematic theaters, computer interfaces all make use of both visual and auditory stimuli. Material books, magazines, letters, as well as email and instant messaging typically limit their messaging to visual modalities. Recorded music presentations are usually offered as auditory stimuli only, but a live (or visually recorded) musical presentation includes a visual component as well. Watching a movie in a theater that has an enhanced sound system can actually add a tactile modality to the presentation as well, as the lower pitched or louder sounds – base notes, explosions – can be experienced through the tactile stimuli of vibrations in your seat.
Immediacy
Immediacy is a term commonly used in communicative theories to refer to how physiologically engaging a message can be. We can think of this in reference to the degree of central nervous system arousal a message creates. Consider, for instance, the experience of watching a movie such as the most recent in the Star Wars franchise, Rogue One. We can watch Rogue One in its entirety on our smartphones with high resolution images and sound. Yet, given the choice, most viewers would opt to see Rogue One in a theater rather than on their phone. Why is this? Both experiences employ the same modalities, visual and auditory. The difference is one of immediacy. The theater sound offers a greater bandwidth of frequencies, greater highs and lows, and greater separation of sounds as well. Speakers are distributed around the theater, allowing different sounds to reach movie goers from all directions. The visual experience, too, is unlike anything provided on even our largest cell phone screens. The image is higher resolution and the colors are brighter. The screen is too large to take in without moving our heads. Vistas can seem overwhelming in a way they never will be on a cell phone screen. In short, watching a movie in a theater is more physiologically engaging; smartphones afford a much less immediate viewing experience than do movie theaters.
Message Accessibility
The ease with which a person can both access and revisit message content varies across different interface systems. Consider a spoken conversation, where the media system is compressions in the air: messages are rather easy to access—all we have to do is be present in a space where someone is speaking (and indeed, sometimes we hear the conversations of people around us, even when we don’t intend to). However, spoken messages ephemeral—that is, once they are spoken, they are gone. If we don’t hear a word or a phrase, we cannot rewind and replay it. Now, consider a printed book as an interface system: messages are slightly harder to access (one has to open the book and then exert some effort to read—a task most people find more difficult than speaking). However, messages in a book are available to revisit: if you miss a word or phrase, you can go back and re-read a sentence or paragraph quite easily. Unless the book (i.e., media system) itself gets damaged, you can return to exactly the same passage—and access exactly the same message—weeks, months, or years later. These two dimensions of accessibility, effort required and potential to revisit content, are largely independent of each other (i.e., a media system can be high on both, low on both, or a combination of high and low).
Message Availability
How much stimuli is available at any given point in time, and how quickly communicators can access that stimuli, both contribute to the message availability afforded by a media system. As examples of how message availability can vary, consider traditional newspapers contrasted with online news sites. A traditional, physical newspaper offers a large amount of stimuli at a given point in time: we can unfold and see two large pages of content in front of us at once. We could even spread multiple pages in front of us across a table, should we choose. The digital version of that paper is always limited by the computer monitor (or tablet/phone screen) that serves as its interface device. A cell phone cannot offer more than a paragraph or two from a single article. A large enough computer screen can present perhaps a portion of a couple articles, perhaps more—but not nearly as much as two or more large pieces of newsprint. However, when it comes to how quickly people can access stimuli, a digital interface might offer some advantages: because most online sites are searchable, a reader might be able to find a story or topic of interest more quickly than he or she would be able to flipping through a physical newspaper.
Control over Message Presentation
Another affordance in interface media systems is communicators’ control over the message they receive. Specifically, with different media systems, communicators can exert different degrees of control over the message presentation or format. Reading a print book, we have very little control over how messages are presented to us: the page size, font size, font style, and amount of text on a page are all fixed, and cannot be altered. Traditional, face-to-face conversations (where air is the media system), are similar: we have minimal control over the presentation and format of messages produced by others. (We can ask a fellow communicators to change the volume of their voice or to repeat something, but this involves the communicators changing the presentation of their message, which is different from our ability to exert control over an existing message, via the media system).
Watching a show on television, we have a bit more control over how the messages we see and hear are presented: we can turn the volume up and down, add closed-captioning, and adjust the colors and resolution of the images on our TVs. With devices such as DVRs, we can record a TV show to be watched on our own schedule. Even a live broadcast can be paused while we answer the phone, and resumed when our call is finished. Digital books as interface systems offer us even more control over presentation of their message content: We can change the type of font used as well as the size of the font (in case we misplace our glasses). We can change the amount and type of backlighting they provide, so we can read in the dark. We can interact with the words such that we can tap an unrecognized word and a definition will be at our fingertips. We can enter a word or phrase into a search window and explore each use of that term. Options for leaving bookmarks and “marginal” comments are far greater than with paper books. Digital books provide essentially the same message as do paper books, but they greatly expand a reader’s control over how the message is presented and formatted.
Summary and Conclusion
In this chapter, we have asserted that all communication requires a media system, because media systems provide access the brains and minds of other people. We identified two primary functions of media: message distribution and the message interface. In other words, media are instrumental to moving messages and to presenting messages to communicators. Distributing messages is accomplished with two types of media systems. The first, conduit media, are systems through which messages move from place to place. These include air, light, copper and fiber optic cables, and various frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. The second, carrier media, are systems on which messages are recorded. To distribute these messages, we have to transport the media system as well, and thus have to rely on traditional means of material transport.
Interfacing with messages is accomplished through the use of materials and technologies that make messages accessible to our senses. Sometimes, distributing messages requires that messages be transformed to accommodate efficient transport of the messages. Upon arrival at their destination, these messages have to be transformed back into a state that is accessible to our senses—for this, we need a media system that functions as an interface.
We also reviewed a variety of affordances that could be used to compare and media systems. In doing so, we have provided a manner in which to think about both similarities and differences across these media systems. This calls attention to the similarities and shared functionality between things that might otherwise seem unrelated: air, copper cable, and microwaves; stone tablets, magnetic tapes, and flash drives—all have something fundamental in common, as media systems. Thinking about media in terms of affordances also provides a means by which we can talk about relative advantages and disadvantages of different systems. These affordances help us see and recognize the type and amount of stimuli—and thus, the size, type, and format of messages—that communicators can use in different media systems. As such, these affordances provide tools for strategically selecting media systems—for example, choosing between air and copper cables as means for distributing messages, or words on a page versus words on an LCD screen versus words drawn in the sand—as means to present and distribute messages to others.
