Characteristics Of Media:
the message beneath

A Report on a Book in Progress

Davis Foulger
Visiting Associate Professor
Oswego State University

QUEST Research Day.
Oswego State University.
April 24, 2002.

"The Medium is the Message"

Perhaps the most famous "probe" of Marshall McLuhan

• McLuhan says a lot about
  • the nature of the medium's message
    • the effects of media
    • the nature of media
    • even the characteristics of media
      • hot and cold
• but he never says how the medium's message happens
  • or what would make one medium's message different than another's

Whatever the medium's message, media enable people's messages

• two kinds of systems enable messages
  • one is the medium that passes the message
  • the other is the language the message is written in
• Language provides shared meaning
• Media provide an infrastructure

So if the medium is the message

• how does the medium's message happen
• how might one medium's message differ from another's

Media, like languages, are inventions

We create them in a quintet ... ... five interacting spheres of invention and evolution Each sphere creates a part of a medium's message: A medium's interface (an artifact's interface, Simons, 1969) is a "visible" subset of its mediators. A medium's rules of behavior are negotiated practices. We decide what a medium's effects are. We make a medium real by applying it it to various uses We create a medium's possibilities in giving it characteristics The book I am currently writing focuses on these characteristics

Characteristics can be thought of as a message beneath a medium

a set of possibilities attributes properties goals (Simon, 1969) when used to describe new media usually few vary wildly 4 a magic number Figure at right built from 12 characteristics a large number compared with other studies

I operationalize about 190 characteristics of media within 12 groups

Power Mediators: the engines of time and space machines

Share, in common, features that support both transmission and storage

• Human Memory
  • Allowed the movement of messages through space and time
  • Often through the use of memory tricks (pattern, rhythm and rhyme)
  • Frail and prone to changes in the message over the course of time
• Paper and Paper Analogues
  • Markings and tokens
  • Clay tablets
  • Parchment
  • Papyrus
  • Manufactured paper
• Manufacture
  • Manufactured paper makes the printing press successful
  • Augmented today with audio, video, and other manufacturing
• Computers
  • Can also agent-modify a message
    • and fill roles formerly associated only with people
  • Perhaps the most powerful mediator of all

Characteristic Participants

The Goal is to Analyze all the Groups of Characteristics

Using about 100 media for the comparison

Finding clusters of media within groups

Looking for underlying dimesionality, and meta-dimensionality

For if there is a message in the medium

Characteristics are a good place to start

• in teasing out the specifics
• and showing how the message can be manipulated

This is the first of several planned books

• a second, tentatively titled "Building Time Machines: The Invention and Evolution of Media"
• is already outlined and underway

Like this book it will attempt to expand our study of media

• for the most part constrained to a small number of media
  • effects of media (uses and gratifications and media ecologies)
  • the history of media
  • the practice of media
• voices like McLuhan's, that look across media, are rare
  • and systematic studies that cross media are rarer

I look forward to reporting progress on it next year