Joshua Meyrowitz (2009), ‘Medium Theory: An Alternative to the Dominant Paradigm of Media Effects’ in The Sage Handbook of Media Processes and Effects, Ed. R. L Nabi and M. B. Oliver (Sage).

This reading I  did a couple weeks back because our topic for Project Brief 4 is on mediums and media technologies, so I read it in order to get a feel for what we should explore in our audio and video essays.

Meyrowitz firstly explores the different medium issues and characteristics that lay within media. He says that the characteristics are mainly:

• The type of sensory information the medium is able and unable to transmit eg visual
• The forms of information conveyed
• The degree of verisimilitude between the medium form and “reality”.
• The degree and type of control the users have over reception and transmission
• The mediums durability

He then goes into the history of medium theory, which the first explicit medium theory was articulated by Socrates (469-399 BC), who, as a master of oral discourse, looked at the spread of writing with a suspicious and critical eye. Writing, he recognized, was not just another way of speaking. Writing, Socrates said, would lead to forgetfulness, because writers and readers would no longer need to rely on their memories. In addition, writing diminished dialogue, since a reader could not ask a text a question or directly influence the thoughts of the writer. Its weird thinking that people in the BC were the masters of medium theories and that they knew the be all and end all. But Socrates idea that the reader could not ask a question or influence the thoughts of the writer due to the decrease in dialogue. Imagine if it was like that now. Socrates was the president and he was like “you cant ask me what my memories are because I don’t need to remember what happened in the office with my administrator, its all about who said what in the office”. That doesn’t really make sense, but you know what I mean.