Last year my science professor Mr. Steven Holt asked me to define life. And as easy as it may seem it was one of the hardest questions I had to answer. Through studying and analyzing ‘life’ I learned that you can never truly understand it. However you can define life by listing its unique cluster of characteristics. Nevertheless by studying and analyzing “media” I have come to realize that it is very similar to ‘life’ and that it too can never truly be understood. However it can be defined by listing its unique cluster of characteristics.
What do I mean when I say media cannot be understood? Take for example any medium, let’s say your blackberry. What is a blackberry? Is it some plastic, some metal and some glass combined together? Or is it a by-product of oil, by-product of nuclear fusion, and by-product of superheated sand. Or is your black berry a result of 4 billion years of evolution of amino acids? Or maybe even just debris from a supernova? Is your phone nothing but atoms put together in a particular sequence? Or is it simply stored energy/matter? The truth of the matter is you never truly know or understand your blackberry. Your blackberry is a façade. Its content; the plastic, the metal, the glass is another façade covering yet another curtain. The process goes on. In fact all the above mentioned contents of a blackberry are curtains to more content. And where do all these curtains and facades come from? The answer is the processes of socialization. From the time we are born society starts labeling things, creating facades. The word ‘book’ is a façade for an object presented to us when we are in school. And that is a façade to the words in the book which are a façade to the atoms which make up the pages. All of this labeling is a result of interacting with society. At the crux of it all, media constitute unprecedented amounts of content which curtains more content. I would say it is similar to my understanding of life. It is important to know that the content could be physical; metals, atoms etc…and non-physical like information, ideas etc…
Analogous to life let us attempt to define media by listing its unique cluster of characteristics knowing that we will never truly be able to understand what media truly is. 1) I believe Media, apart from the obvious consumer electronics, include paintings and sushi etc… Media are made up of different cells or circuits or elements that perform a certain function. Eg: The CPU in computer processes binary calculations, structure of carbon in a diamond serves the function of making it hard etc… 2) Complex organization patterns are found in all media and life. Eg: The unique arrangement of carbon atoms in a diamond compared to the arrangement of carbon atoms in my body. 3) Media uses energy or rather converts energy from one form to another. Kind of like life as well. Eg: The TV uses electric energy and converts it into heat, light, UV radiation etc… and in life plants use energy from the sun to convert into food/glucose through a process called photosynthesis. 4) Like in life, a medium too is Homeostatic. It has an ability to maintain its internal stability by adjusting the amount of electricity it consumes. Eg: laptop uses less energy when on battery saving mode. And the human heart beats faster when running. 5)&6) Growth and Reproduction are other qualities that a medium shares with life. For example print media grew with the invention of the printing press just as a bodybuilder grows in size with the invention of steroids. And the computer and the phone reproduced the smart phone just like the man and the woman produced a child.
In conclusion, If Marshal Mcluhan argues that media are the extensions of man then I would say that media are living things. Media and life are similar when it comes to the unique cluster of characteristics that define it however we know that media includes more than just life. To sum up media include life and everything else including all the conceivable and unconceivable content. Therefore everything is media.
