Introduction: What is a medium? Theologies, technologies and aspirations

Abstract

Anybody posing the question 'What is a medium?' has to confront the great multiplicity and broad range of the items and phenomena that have been considered a medium in the scholarly literature. Certainly, for many authors the field of media vastly exceeds the realm of communication technology in an everyday sense. To give an impression, in a recent survey of the field, the following objects and phenomena were listed as having been labelled a medium: a chair, a wheel, a mirror (McLuhan); a school class, a soccer ball, a waiting room (Flusser); the electoral system, a general strike, the street (Baudrillard); a horse, the dromedary, the elephant (Virilio); money, power and influence (Parsons); art, belief and love (Luhmann) (Münker and Roesler 2008: 11). What, then, if anything, cannot be a medium? And, more to the point of this issue, could the answers we might give point to something like an anthropological approach to media?

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