Glossary 101: What is media anyway?

Or should we say what “are” media? Who works in media? To whom is it addressed?

And what is a bot, while we’re at it? “Real people. No bots,” we like to say here at Media.com. What do we mean?

Answers…

In its purest form, media is the plural of medium, but the word also tends to mean “mass media” in modern usage under which the internet is a medium (like television or radio) under which content sustains like empty or filling calories, depending on the content.

A more basic definition would be something that transmits information; a cave painting is media like a website or photograph. Each is a representation of something else, something arguably “real.” An artifact. A horse painted on rock, say, or a company branded on the world wide web, or a Fourth of July party pic from three years back. Make sense? If you answer “not really,” congrats. You’re more normal than you know. It’s a moveable word; it has many homes. Once upon a time, the media was an elite class, but now everyone is part of the media creating all manner of further media within overlapping mediums. Social media saw to that.

More confoundingly, plenty would argue “the Internet” is a technological force deserving of that capital I. In this sense, the Internet fuels and powers media but does not coexist with other mediums (if not the lower-case internet). More like it wraps all those mediums into one. This is the tech-favored view: that media bows before the Internet, not vice versa. That all media is now downstream of that capital I.  

Mastering medium 

Media is a many-headed cubist confusion, in other words. It is a puzzle. It’s where William Shakespeare and Donald Trump meet. The latter is a master of a medium (television), while the former was also the master of a medium (public theater). Both medium kings and media entrepreneurs who sought to create their own content within the medium they ruled or (yes) still rule. Both sought profit from market dominance. It is no mistake President Trump partnered with another medium royalty, Elon Musk, social media overlord — who lately urges media consumers to trust X over legacy options provided by “the lamestream media.”  

The stakes are high. Malcolm X called media “the most powerful entity on earth.” He appears to have meant “the press,” but maybe he meant the whole dang concept.

“They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses,” he said. 

This dark overtone has lately been taken up about social media. The writer L.G. Davis says social media “is a platform for people to spread lies about themselves.” This appears to have become the default negative view of online networks. Phew. 

King Lear summed up our modern relationship with media when he said, “Get thee glass eyes, and like a scurvy politician seem to see the things thou dost not.” Seem to see — not see. This is the nature of media consumption. We often fake ourselves into believing media is real and end up trapped in the debate about realness itself. Edgar replies that Lear had mixed reason and madness. Welcome to modern media then, where “all the world is a stage,” as Shakespeare also said — thus causing some to view the playwright as the father of social media as well as the networks hosted there.

His characters often addressed an audience directly, after all, and the audience responded. How is that not a crude online network or virtual gathering? The groundlings present at a Shakespeare comedy or tragedy were a voluble Sub-Reddit before we invented Reddit.

“Virtual” because the situation audiences found themselves in was relational to content not real people. It was not a spontaneous Prince Hamlet moaning about existence in the town square. No, Hamlet was a fictional character as well as a copycat hybrid of other characters. Hamlet the character was a repost, whereas Hamlet the play is how virtual performances and reposts build on themselves like a game of Tetris gone right or wrong. That “right or wrong” depends on the player or (indeed) on the players being played, or the extent of the reposts.

A game of Tetris then, with too many cooks at the controls. Sounds like modern media.

Distracting ‘the watchdog of the mind’

Content itself having spurred the interaction between character and audience, between playwright and masses. This dynamic echoes the theories of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian academic who wrote Understanding Media, published in 1964. Content, he warned, is like the “juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” In other words, while we were watching or making cat videos, Mark Zuckerberg was gathering data and selling it to advertisers, in much the same way NBC devised The Tonight Show to sell detergent. The content did not then and does not now matter, in McLuhan’s estimation. That is media’s basic trick. The medium and how it affects us: This is what matters.

Our statement about President Trump was not political, to clarify. No, what we’re saying is — for better or worse — he’s good on television and knows it. His statement about an already infamous confrontation with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office said it all. “This is going to be great television,” he quipped, as he shut down the meeting. If you find this distasteful, it could well be you’re responding to the medium. It could well be that Trump devotees can’t get enough of his television show, while you, well — you’ve moved on to other mediums.

As for the president’s desire to also dominate the internet, in addition to television, that would make him “multi-medium” as well as multi-media. Oh, the places we pretend to go.

Speaking of, what is “fake” media? Isn’t it all fake or staged? Crucially, yes. Media represents real, as stated. Cave paintings of bears do not manifest as real bears that spring from rock walls. Motion pictures and novels are the same. They fake us into believing characters presented are real, that they might transmigrate from screens and books and share our sofas and popcorn any second, in person. Funny how they never do.

Those in charge of media operations offered us all this content so they can sell us stuff, finally. Or we pay for content to minimize the part where they show us stuff to buy. Or (better yet) we think ourselves clever and “create” content ourselves; this thinking-ourselves-clever is addictive (turns out) so we end up haunting platforms and (voila!) become more targetable targets. This content crack we think ourselves clever enough to distribute then identifies our inner selves in public, creating precisely the information those selling us stuff like to horde and repackage. Welcome to the fun house. 

If you’re super-clever about your content, you might influence others … to do what? What an influencer really influences is creation of a short-cut to his/her/their followers. An influencer works for the app in question as well as its medium. Followers should be called an ad package; that’s what they are. This is why social media executives want more influencers. A modern media CEO’s favorite invention: an enthusiastic employee who works off the payroll for no benefits, to be dismissed or marginalized by the CEO’s algorithm when the algorithm sees fit.

All the better if the content is fired by outrage, of course. Anonymous outrage being just as addictive as thinking ourselves clever. All of which nets (pun intended) a medium that may well be the medium destroyer, as it has combined all media into one kaleidoscopic frenzy.

But let’s not just be cynical

There’s also connectivity and knowledge and real benefits within the internet – that capital I having fallen out of favor lately. It is much like navigable oceans. We reach across the planet but find dangers when we do. Such is the nature of stretching; we’re vulnerable while we do it. We arguably know more about “us” than we ever have in the process. We evolve along with our media and mediums in an optimistic world. What we’re saying is, let’s understand that these rabbit holes are precisely that before we enter. And let’s invent a better way (media.com) to manage all our media.

As for bots, well, a bot is short for robot. They often present as metallic monsters or clearly spoken women named Siri or Alexa. They are called words like “web-crawler.” Within social media, bots are usually software programs that help avoid repetitive human labor as well as amplify the reactions and comments found there. Bots can like, post, share and comment on content. They can follow real users or other bots pretending to be real users. They can send DMs. They can chat with a real person or create controversial art forms. They can scrape for data without conscience. They reflect us, it seems. They do what we tell them to do.

Our answers having led to more questions, as they do. What do you think of all this? Does this sort of literacy talk help, hinder, blow smoke? Let us know.