Mediology can be viewed as a synthesis of prior and contemporary theory for a larger systems model of media and communication.

• Major viewpoints and breakthroughs:
  • Importance of studying transmission over time in/through social and cultural institutions, not simply viewing communication as ocurring in one social moment.
  • Institutional means of transmission always precedes the content of what is communicated.
  • The institutional means of communication--the cultural embeddedness of media, communication, and transmission over time--is what is left out of most theories of media and communication.
    
• Technology is what culture produces: technology as part of, imbedded in, culture, not in opposition to culture.
• Technologies only provide a "support" or transport mechanism; institutions and social organization are required to give media and what is mediated a cultural force.
  
• Media is a combination of cultural materiality and political/social institutions.
• Materiality of media already culturally encoded prior to specific content being transmitted.
  • For examples, books, movies, television, computer software and digital content, Web and Internet media are already culturally encoded and institutionally empowered as media technologies per se as bearing a level of institutional validation before any message is interpreted through them.
  • One aspect of "the medium is the message" not fully examined is the pre-encoding of media technologies as conveyors of social meaning prior to their use in transmitting information or content.
• Media forms a system, not individual media functioning independently.
• A new medium or technology does not replace or substitute a prior technology, but creates a new configuration of the entire media system with the inclusion of the new.
  • The system forms a media ecology as well as a social hierachy of technologies and mediated content. (Example: "As seen on TV.")

Communication, Transmission, and Institutional Frameworks: what prior theory left out

• Communication and transmission: communication theories are modeled on the synchronic (present moment communication) and mostly ignore transmission of messages or content over time (diachronic)
• Communication models have also been centered on individuals in a sender/encoder-receiver/decoder structure and mostly ignore institutions that support transmission over time
• All media require a situatedness or given position of the communicator or interpreter in an institution of meaning for meanings or contents to be transmitted
• Without transmission there would be no human memory
  • Examples: schools, professions, religions, museums, libraries, media structures (book and magazine publishing, news media, advertising, fashion, movies, TV)
    

Background and context for Media Manifestos

• Regis Debray

  Essays were originally part of Debray's Doctoral defense at the University of Paris, and assumes familiarity with current French thought in philosophy, politics, linguistics, and media studies.
• Debray founded Les Cahiers de médiologie, the journal of mediology, and a series of publications by other media philosophers.

Mediology: "the discipline that treats of the higher social functions in their relations with the technical structures of transmission" (Debray, Media Manifestos, 11).

• Emphasis on materiality of media, the multiple functions of mediation, the intersection of media with institutions, politics, and economics.

The senses of "medium" and the materiality of communication media. For Debray, "medium" can mean:

• 1. a symbolic process (writing, image, etc.)
• 2. a social code (like a natural language)
• 3. a material transmission device (paper, magnetic storage medium, screen)
• 4. recording and distribution system (publisher, TV network, information system)
  • But it also means "milieu" (the lived environment, the social life of media and communication technologies) and "mediation" (the social and material intermediaries that create communication).
• Pp. 16-17: the medium may be new, but the milieu is old; communication is always a palimpsest, an accumulation of layers of past and present practices: "I am papyrus, parchment, paper, computer screen. I am Decalogue, Francois Villon, Lenin, and Macintosh, I am pictogram and alphabet, text and hypertext, manuscript, printed page, and radiating screen.
  

Communication and Transmission

• Real-time communication using existing media
  • One-to-one
  • One-to-many
  • Many-to-many
  • Many-to-one
• Transferal of communication over time through institutions and transitions in media: transmission
• Political, cultural, economic, and technological consequences of transmission
  

Debray and the Idea of a Media System:
the social distribution of media systems, the material means and political/ideological structures that distribute power and authority to various media.

• Media exist in an ecosystem of uses and social functions: new media do not replace earlier media in any simple way (like exchange or substitution), but new media change the whole social and economic system of media and change the relations among media used in a society.
• The adoption of new media entails a reconfiguration of media relationships and hierarchies in a total social system of media.
• For example, the Internet doesn't "replace" broadcast media or printed books, but causes the previously existing media systems to be revalued and reinterpreted in a total system of media that includes the Internet and digital media.

Marshall McLuhan, television interview loops, 1960s

• McLuhan observed that the "content" of a new medium is a previously existing medium: TV first did radio shows and theatre, printed books reproduced the context of manuscripts, and so on. This is a media ecology view. Today, we say the Web has "pages" and "channels", and we see the content of the Web in terms of print, broadcast, and telecommunications features.
• Media convergence in the wake of the convergence of computing and telecommunications, that is, the digitization of all media and the transmission or delivery of this media through digital networks, created a new environment for understanding "media ecology".
• For Debray, the whole social system of media at any historical moment is termed a "mediasphere".
• What's missing from this model?
  • Political-economy explicitly? the role of business, markets, capital, consumer demand? the role of innovation and invention, technology adoption as political and economic process?