What is Media?

If you ever attempt to ask, know the question is best answered by asking not what media is but rather what it does. Media is simply that which does like media — acting as interlocutor between you and Reality. Media is really just anything that gives you an opportunity to engage with the world, any aspect of Reality affording 'particular behavior'.

If in your personal ontology you still lack a top-level concept to refer to stuff in general, media works beautifully. Consider for example wood, rocks, buildings, furniture, electronics, software, or simply look at the stuff around you. When in doubt just remember, for something to 'be' like media it has to 'do' like media.

If in fact everything is media – if you accept the media notion itself – suffice it to say that 'what media does' encompasses the entire world of function. We are talking about any function that may be given, delivered, or performed by any sort of device or artifact, regardless of quality or nature or mode of existence.

Media acts like media by way of allowing a particular behavior, by making it possible and available to you. You can call this 'mediation', a simple dynamic whereby an artifact bridges interaction between you and the rest of the world. We call it affordance, the aspect of this dynamic whereby a particular behavior becomes perceptibly available to you. Afforded behaviors are distinguished by the nature of the bridging artifact itself.

• ✰ ⇢ Term / Media, Process of Mediation