Ok, given the responses I am going to hazard one last argument for polymedia and then I promise I will desist from posting more. Mirca and I were well aware of terms such as media ecology which is what I used to use in the past. But such a term implies a communication landscape whose niches are occupied by various media according to their constraints and affordances, and which I guess may also mesh or otherwise. But the units are specific types of media and their relationship to each other. By contrast what Mirca and I noticed from our Philippine study, which led us to coin a new word, and then seems paralleled in Gershon's study is something else. For the Filipinos it has just as much to do with changes in price as technology and is very recent. What we noticed is that different people see the same media in very different ways. As my examples were intended to show, one person see texting as ideal for affection, another sees it as cold. But each person creates their own sense of that media in relation to this new set of affordable other possibilities. The effect of this is not so much a change in media but a kind of re-socialising of media, so that the choice is now seen as significant in itself, i.e. as a major form of communication in its own right. Often with sender and receiver reading quite different things into that choice. So the term polymedia does not privilege the media as the units, but rather acknowledges a new situation in which media in general are viewed as less issues of technology and price and more issues of social and moral determination. Having said that, people are obviously free to use whatever terms they are comfortable with, no one has authority here. In fact that the one thing you can bet with academics, is that whether or not we get polymedia, we will always find poly-semantics ! Danny