(By Joshua Babcock)
Like other keywords in this series, “media” is a diverse concept and category. At once broad and narrow, “media” can refer to media industries—as in “the media”—often with added modifiers, like “the liberal media,” “the alt-right media,” or “the media establishment.” Usually, when we talk about media, we assume that we’re dealing with technologies of mass communication: things like TV, radio, podcasts, the traditional press, social media, and even online messaging platforms that disseminate messages and connect large numbers of people simultaneously.
These are important, but they’re just part of the story. As a term, “medium” also describes anything that acts as a means of accomplishing something, an intervening substance, or the material that enables something to happen. In this sense, both medium in the singular and media in the plural are always about mediation: how one thing is necessary for another thing to exist, happen, or enable something else to happen afterward.
This is admittedly very abstract, but these are also things we experience intuitively all the time. For instance, protest slogans and chants are media: they are the medium through which political goals get voiced by a group of people gathered in a physical space. Slogans and chants might also circulate to other platforms, like journalistic reports or social media posts. In this case, the reports, posts, and online platforms themselves mediate the circulation of the message. They are a means of accomplishing something: getting a message to audiences beyond people who attended the event, raising awareness of a social movement, motivating others to organize their own protests, etc. However, they are also the material through which those acts are accomplished: online interfaces, written language, recorded audio, videos, photos, etc. Media can be low-tech, too: a piece of cardboard and paint; a pen and paper; even a stick used to draw in the sand—all of these are media.
Like the other keywords that orient this series, “media” is/are complex and situationally specific. This is true both in terms of what counts as a medium or process of mediation in the first place, and in terms of the effects that result or are made possible by the use of a medium. It’s also important to pay attention to the ecology of available media: like natural environments, media always exist in combination with other media, and these combinations create new opportunities as much as they afford forms of competition and destructive interference.
The question of which media get used, how, and to do what thus takes us back to politics. As I’ve written here, in its broadest sense, politics is about who gets what, where, and how, including issues of who gets represented (or not), where, and how. The choice to use one medium over another shapes who can access the message, how it can circulate, and what they can do with it.
This is clearest in the case of language. As I and my coauthors also wrote earlier, language itself is a medium. Even if some languages have prominence as global languages, no language is actually universally accessible. We might like to think that communicating in English gives a message its best chance to reach the most people, but the global rise of English has led to as much confusion as it has opportunities for easy or even low-effort understanding among groups. This includes the rise of linguistic discrimination against speakers of languages other than English in anglophone countries like the U.S., as well as more subtle forms of accent-based discrimination. When it comes to talking politics, then, we need to pay attention to what gets said and how, along with the media through which that communication happens (or not).
Further Resources
Advanced + technical texts
Elisend Ardèvol. 2018. “Media Anthropology.” International Encyclopedia of Anthropology.
Ilana Gershon. 2010. “Media Ideologies: An Introduction.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.
Matt Tierney and Mathias Nilges. 2021. “Medium and Mediation.” Postmodern Culture: Journal of Interdisciplinary Thought on Contemporary Cultures.
Free + content-accessible resources
Bryce Peake. 2020. “Media Anthropology: Meaning, Embodiment, Infrastructure, and Activism.” In Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, 2nd Edition, edited by Nina Brown, Thomas McIlwraith, and Laura Tubelle de González.
Anita Zandstra. 2023. “How to Respond to a Political Slur: Contestatory Identity Positioning in a Bolivian Meme Cycle.” Talking Politics Blog.
Coming soon
(June 1) Yookyeong Im. 2023. “The Poetics of U.S. Empire in South Korean Queer Politics.” Talking Politics Blog.
Comments
Post a Comment