Medium

Thinking
New Media Writing
medium thinking
1. An agency or means of doing something
”using the latest technology as a medium for job
creation”
• A means by which something is communicated or
expressed
“American sign language is the medium of
instruction"
• Anything commonly agreed as a token of value
and used in transactions in a trading system;
currency
“cigarettes are the medium of exchange in
prisons”
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2. The intervening substance through which
impressions are conveyed to the senses or a force
acts on objects at a distance.
"speech needs a physical medium to be heard;
in space, then, no one can hear you scream”
• A pervading or enveloping substance; the
substance in which an organism lives; esp. one in
which microorganisms, cells, etc., are cultured. In
extended use: one's environment, conditions of
life, or usual social setting.
"grow bacteria in a nutrient-rich medium”
A Quiet Place, 2018
Bird Box, 2018
Gravity, 2012
A Quiet Place, 2018
Bird Box, 2018
Gravity, 2012
medium thinking
“Media are vessels and environments,
containers of possibility that anchor our
existence and make what we do possible,”
writes John Durham Peters. “[Peters] joins those
returning to the Latin root of media, medius, as it
has come to mean middle or milieu or as it is
used to describe elemental atmospheres like
water, air, earth, or re” (Keller Easterling).
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 medium thinking

“First blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around

each creature to represent its own world,
lled with the perceptions which it
alone knows”
—Jacob von Uexküll
fi
medium thinking “...this eyeless animal nds the way to her watchpoint with the
help of only its skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach
of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit
only through her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid,
which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals,
works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her
post and fall blindly downward toward her prey. If she is
fortunate enough to fall on something warm then she has
attained her prey, the warm-blooded animal, and thereafter
needs only the help of her sense of touch to nd the least hairy
spot possible and embed herself up to her head in the
cutaneous tissue of her prey. She can now slowly suck up a
stream of warm blood” (Agamben).

For the tick, the umwelt is reduced to only three (biosemiotic)

carriers of signi cance:
1. the odor of butyric acid, which emanates from
the sebaceous follicles of all mammals
2. the temperature of 37°C (corresponding to the blood of all
mammals)
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3. A person claiming to be in contact with the spirits of

the dead and communicating between the dead and
the living.
“the medium told me that David Bowie said I
was rad.”
medium thinking

Taste buds on the human tongue. Bacteria at home in the human gut. A dust mite living in the human scalp.

“Media are our infrastructures of being, the habitats and materials through
which we act and are. This gives them ecological, ethical, and existential
import” (John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds).
Cilia in the human lungs. Measuring COVID’s reach in human breath. A geoglyph in Peru.
medium thinking

communication
rhetoric
writing
Cilia in the human lungs. Taste buds on the human tongue.

Human breath communicating COVID. A geoglyph in Peru.

Medium
Thinking
New Media Writing