• Introduction: What is a medium? Theologies, technologies and aspirations

    Author(s):
    Patrick Eisenlohr (see profile)
    Date:
    2011
    Group(s):
    Anthropology
    Subject(s):
    Mass media--Study and teaching, Anthropology, Religion
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    media anthropology, religion and media, Mediality, Media studies, Media theory
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/0yxx-wg92
    Abstract:
    Anybody posing the question ‘What is a medium?’ has to confront the great multiplicity and broad range of the items and phenomena that have been considered a medium in the scholarly literature. Certainly, for many authors the field of media vastly exceeds the realm of communication technology in an everyday sense. To give an impression, in a recent survey of the field, the following objects and phenomena were listed as having been labelled a medium: a chair, a wheel, a mirror (McLuhan); a school class, a soccer ball, a waiting room (Flusser); the electoral system, a general strike, the street (Baudrillard); a horse, the dromedary, the elephant (Virilio); money, power and influence (Parsons); art, belief and love (Luhmann) (Münker and Roesler 2008: 11). What, then, if anything, cannot be a medium? And, more to the point of this issue, could the answers we might give point to something like an anthropological approach to media?
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8676.2010.00134.x
    Publisher:
    Wiley
    Pub. Date:
    2011-1-25
    Journal:
    Social Anthropology
    Volume:
    19
    Issue:
    1
    Page Range:
    1 - 5
    ISSN:
    0964-0282
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    3 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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