Thank you very much for you interesting response! Kind regards, Michaël -----Original Message----- From: Anders Fagerjord [mailto:anders.fagerjord@media.uio.no] Sent: maandag 13 maart 2006 9:21 To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] Internet as medium with different sub-media or channels? Hi, Michaël! 'Medium' is a confusing word, as it is used in (at least) four different ways: (1) as material used in a work of art, like "oil on canvas". This is the sense of the word Lev Manovich is using in _The Language of New Media_. (2) As file types, such as (ASCII) text, video, image, etc. You find this use in Computer Science. (3) as any kind of technology linking people together (or as McLuhan put it: an extension of the human senses). "Internet" will be a medium in this sense. (4) As a complex institution consisting of (at least) a technology (like broadcast TV), an economic pattern (like commercials or licence fee), a set of law regulations (for TV, you typically need a charter, and there are special regulations in terms of ownership, content, etc.), a typical use in a society (for TV, prime time is in the evening, when people want to be entertained), and some dominant genres (for TV: sit-coms, news, sports, reality...). This last sense is the one normally implied, if not explicitly accounted for, in media studies. As I do media studies, that is my favorite too. I would say that the Internet is a technology (as ink and paper is), enabling several other technologies such as Web, e-mail, chat, ftp, RSS, online gaming, etc. These technologies will in turn be made into media. Even the Web is not one medium in my view. Before the net, no one would say that a book and a bookshop was the same. It make no more sense to me to claim that New York Times on the web, an online novel like Sunshine '69, a Java game, Ebay, and Amazon.com are the same medium. For practical research, i think 'genre' is a much more useful concept than 'medium'. It is more flexible, and more theorised in a useful way. Check out Genette's _Architext_ for a great discussion on genre. I've written about this in a chapter of my thesis: Fagerjord, Anders. _Rhetorical Convergence: Earlier Media Influence on Web Media Form._ Oslo: Unipub, 2003. --anders ........................ Anders Fagerjord, Ph.D. Associate Professor Department of Media and Communication University of Oslo P.O. Box 1093 Blindern, N-0317 OSLO, Norway Tel. +47 22 85 04 11 Fax +47 22 85 04 01 http://fagerjord.no _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/