Medium Specificity and Materiality
Approaches that take seriously the specific material, technical, and formal properties of media, from individual art forms to hardware, infrastructures, and historical apparatuses.
Definition
Medium specificity is the view that each medium has distinctive material and formal properties shaping what it can express; media materiality is the study of the physical and technical substrates of media and their consequences.
Scope
This area gathers theories that emphasize the particular affordances and materialities of media rather than treating them as neutral carriers of content. It spans aesthetic debates about medium specificity, German materialist media theory, media archaeology's recovery of forgotten and obsolete devices, and the study of media infrastructures and material substrates.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What is distinctive about the material and formal properties of each medium?
- How do hardware, storage, and transmission shape what can be communicated?
- What can obsolete and forgotten media reveal about media history?
- How do infrastructures and material substrates condition mediation?
Key concepts
- Medium specificity
- Materiality
- Hardware
- Apparatus
- Infrastructure
- Media archaeology
Key theories
- Materialist media theory
- Kittler's program of analyzing the technical specificity of recording, transmission, and computation media as the material conditions of discourse and culture.
- Media-specific analysis
- Hayles's call to attend to the materiality of inscription and the specific properties of media when interpreting texts, especially across print and digital forms.
- Media archaeology
- Parikka's account of media archaeology as a method that excavates dead, forgotten, and alternative media to reframe the present and challenge linear histories.
History
Reacting against purely content-oriented and culturalist analysis, German media theory in the 1980s, led by Kittler, foregrounded the materiality of media technologies. This influenced media archaeology, materialist approaches in the digital humanities, and infrastructure studies, which together constitute a materialist counterpoint to interpretive media theory.
Debates
- Materialism versus interpretation
- Whether analysis should privilege the technical materiality of media or the meanings, interpretations, and social uses of media content.
Key figures
- Friedrich Kittler
- N. Katherine Hayles
- Jussi Parikka
- Jay David Bolter
- Richard Grusin
Related topics
Seminal works
- kittler1999
- hayles1999
- parikka2012
- boltergrusin1999
Frequently asked questions
- What does 'medium specificity' mean?
- It is the idea that each medium has particular material and formal capacities that shape what it can do, so analysis should attend to those specific properties.
- How is materialist media theory different from cultural studies?
- It emphasizes the technical and physical substrates of media as conditions of meaning, whereas cultural studies tends to focus on content, audiences, and power.