Media

Abstract

Due to the English adoption, the other national languages disseminated the Latin term medium in its plural form media to describe symbolic and material forms of communication in modern society. The use of the plural term is recent and also the theoretical attention it awakened. It is under “Media Theory,” “Philosophy of the Media,” “Philosophy of the New Media,” etc. that empirical and theoretical research has developed in the last decades in a variety of disciplines and disciplinary crossroads. The English term overlaps with the Latin and thus awakens old echoes. In other national languages the potentiation of these interlinguistic resonances may not be the same as in English. However, in the word media the bond between the English and the Latin uses reveals about the term what theoretically and from the semantic point of view is necessary to take into account, namely ‑mediation. The terms medium and media do not define isolable objects in their material predicates, but rather a material polymorphism in mediation, which is only there in the world of perception, if it forms and/or reproduces communication. At the same time as they seem to designate forms of perception, the media are not bodies or organisms nor psychic states. The present work gives an account of the problems raised by the connections between communication, perception and technique in the media, identifies the classical heritage in the Philosophies of Technique and the modern changes. It is a meta‑theoretical reflection on media theory.