Where does medium collide?

Understanding Media uses medium for any channel or human extension that carries a message, from speech and print to the electric media of radio and television. Marshall McLuhan argued in 1964 that the medium is the message: the form of a channel shapes perception and society more than any content it happens to carry. The referent is a means of communication, and what matters is the channel's own structure, its speed, reach, and the meaning it engages. This meaning shares the word with the others but names a carrier of meaning between people, not a substance things are grown in and not the material a wave moves through.[1]

Unit

A channel or means of communication

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Analysed by its formal properties as a channel, such as its speed, reach, and sensory bias, not scored on a scale

In physics a medium is the material substance through which a mechanical wave travels, the air that carries sound or the water that carries a ripple. Nineteenth-century physics assumed light needed such a medium too, the luminiferous ether, and in 1887 Michelson and Morley built an interferometer to detect the Earth's motion through it. They found no effect, and the null result helped retire the ether and the idea that light needs any carrier at all. The referent is the substance a disturbance propagates in, defined by properties like density and elasticity, not a channel of meaning and not a substance in which anything is grown.[2]

Unit

The material substance a wave propagates through

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Characterised by wave speed and impedance in the material; the historical test of the ether was the null result of interferometry

In art the medium is the material and means an artist works in, oil paint on canvas, bronze, or charcoal, the physical stuff and the conventions that come with it. Clement Greenberg argued in 1960 that modernist painting turned on medium specificity, each art foregrounding what was unique to its own material, flatness and pigment for painting. The referent is an artist's material and the constraints it imposes, and the word points to what the work is made of and how it is made. It shares only the sound with a growth medium or a wave's carrier; here the medium is chosen and shaped by a maker.[3]

Unit

The material an artist works in

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by material and technique, oil, bronze, charcoal, not quantified on a scale