Concept Of Media

CONCEPT OF MEDIA

The word “Media” is derived from latin word medius meaning Medium (middle or the middle position). Plural form of word “medium” is “media”, this word has a long history, with a variety of understandings, but only more recently, in the later 19^th century, did the term begin to enter our vocabulary  in the modern use in which we currently relate it, as a collective noun for most advanced communication technologies.

As said above, the word media hints a rich history extending back to the Latin word medius. Yet the path by which this ancient word (medius) for “middle” came to serve as a collective noun for our most advanced communication technologies is difficult to trace. The philological record informs us that the substantive noun medium was rarely connected with matters of communication before the latter nineteenth century. Although GUIllory did a great job of tracing the origin of the concept from an English version of Aristotle’s Poetics from 1447, it was not truly institutionalized, popularized as a term in our common vocabulary until the work of Marsall Mc Luhan, through his famous book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (964). The development and usage of the concept of “medium” continued to remain untouched until the invention of printing, printing reinstituted interest in the idea of “medium” and the lack of a necessary term in our vocabulary to comprehend(understand) the practice of reproducing the content of manuscript writing and the new possibilities for writing in print.

The emergence of the media concept in the later 19^th century was a response to the proliferation of new technical media-such as the telegraph- that couldnot be assimilated to the older system of the arts. The early modern period saw the first truly major practice of remediation with the invention of printing, which reproduced the contents of manuscript writing at the same time opened up new possibilities for writing in the print medium. Men found themselves possessed of the means of communicating with people all over the world. Bacon, Condorcet still relied on the term art to describe these effects: the “art of communication” Printing transmits what has already been composed by means of other liberal arts.

Francis Bacon was one of the first theorists to struggle with trying to find a way of describing the technical means of communication. Bacon struggles to find a new way of describing these technical means of communication.

CONCEPTUALZATION OF WORD “MEDIA”:

Words are the images of thoughts and letters are the images of words, but yet it is not of necessity that cogitations (thoughts) be expressed by the medium of words, we see the dumb and deaf, their minds are expressed in gestures. Writing is one of the means of communication. The word communication is derived from latin word commnicare, meaning to impart, share or make common, communication entered the English languagein th 14^th and 15 th centuries. The term communication implies imparting, conveying or exchange of ideas, knowledge, information (whether by speech, writing or signs). Hobbes, Locke emphasizes language as the means of communication (means of conveying ideas, knowledge, information). Therefore to communicate our thoughts to one another as well to record them for our own use , SIGNS OF OUR IDEAS  are also necessary. Translation of speech in visible signs, ink and paper. This difference is what we mean by technology. Writing is a technology, but speech is not.

Words are the medium of thought, writing is the medium of speech. Words/writing were seen as conveyer of thoughts, with the aim of communication. Restated, words were the “medium” and the “medium” makes communication possible. For Locke words were seen as the medium of thought.

McLuhan put “the study of media on the Academic map. Before McLuhan, we understood that there was the press and there was speech; that publishing, broadcasting, motion pictures and sound recordings were understood as vehicles of communication; however, until McLuhan we didnot understand that languge is a technology, that tools and machines are form of communication, and that all of these things are MEDIa. He refined his ideas about media and eventually produce his two major works on media :The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media. Content of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print and print is the content of the telegraph.

To use an analogy formed by McLuhan in order to better understand the idea of the medium being as important as the content it carries: The instance of the electric light, it is a medium without a message. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that Medium “a means of conveying something” often requires medium.

Currently, media is the plural form of “medium”, understood as something in a middle position; a means of effecting or conveying something. The concept of media has grown enormously and the term now is used in the modern sense to reference the agencies of mass communication. Hence now it (word media) is used as a collective noun for most advanced communication technologies eg TV, internet, press, magazines, radio.