Medium
Spring 2021
Thinking
New Media Writing
“There may be resonance in the forest without animals
to hear it, but there is no life sound as such without an
animate apparatus of sensing.”
—Stefan Helmreich, “Transduction”
Here at the start it is important to think through
(and with) the key term medium, which means
and therefore does many different things. It is
also necessary to think of medium in terms of its
relationship to technology. Let me explain.
Generally speaking, we speak of doing things
with technology. We use it to do things. The
same is typically said of media. Media and
technology, then, are traditionally taken as
simply means to an end. This class, however,
engages both as more than mere tools in our
hands. It is here where the word medium does
its work.
1. An agency or means of doing something
”using the latest technology as a medium
for job creation”
• A means by which something is
communicated or expressed
“American sign language is the medium
of instruction"
• Anything commonly agreed as a token of
value and used in transactions in a trading
system; currency
“cigarettes are the medium of exchange
in prisons”
2. The intervening substance through which
impressions are conveyed to the senses or a
force acts on objects at a distance.
"speech needs a physical medium to be
heard; in space, then, no one can hear you
scream”
• A pervading or enveloping substance; the
substance in which an organism
lives; esp. one in which microorganisms,
cells, etc., are cultured. In extended use:
one's environment, conditions of life, or
usual social setting.
"grow bacteria in a nutrient-rich
medium”
What’s compelling about this mix of definitions is
how the oscillation among them points to the
ways in which any acton we accomplish takes
place in a medium that makes it possible. We
swim because there is water—we float in the
water. We fly because there is air—we fly
through the air. We hear and speak in and
through the same. My words don’t simply fly
through the air; my voice is the air.
This course thus argues that medium thinking
is something in which we can understand
technology (as well as rhetoric & writing). In
brief, technology (and rhetoric & writing) are not
just as things we do things with; they are also
the media in and through which we do those
things. We don’t simply do rhetoric; we are
saturated by it. We don’t merely use technology;
we are immersed in it.
What is it, then, that we are doing in and through
the medium? It is worth mentioning here that
there is another, perhaps equally productive
definition of medium:
3. A person claiming to be in contact with the
spirits of the dead and communicating
between the dead and the living.
“the medium told me that David
Bowie said I was rad.”
I find this definition productive not because the
work of this class is akin to a séance (it isn’t, I
promise); I find it productive because it imagines
us as media ourselves. It is through us that our
compositions flow. Whatever we have to
communicate is not something that is just our
own, but rather something that comes to and
through us. The ideas, images, sounds and
words that we seemingly use will come to us
from the media surrounding us. And the medium
we are floating in is comprised of other people,
places and things. We are in a medium and it is
through that medium that doing anything is
more or less possible.
“Air is produced as space by sound. Air is sounded.
Sound is aired. The microphone is a sounding device.”
—Marina Peterson, “Wind Matters”
Rivers | ENGL 4010