For other meanings of "medium," see Medium (disambiguation).
A medium (plural media) is a carrier of something. Common things carried by media include information, art, or physical objects. A medium may provide transmission or storage of information or both.
By metonymy, the industries which produce news and entertainment content for the mass media are often called "the media" (in much the same way the newspaper industry is called "the press"). In the late 20th century it became commonplace for this usage to be construed as singular ("The media is...") rather than as the traditional plural.
Types of media
A medium is characterized by what it carries, as follows:
Information media
- Speech, gestures, telephone.
- Stone scores, audio and video recordings, hard disks
- Paper, letter mail
- Mass media: recitations, newspaper, magazine, movies, broadcast media (television, radio, streaming media), Compact discs, DVDs, videocassettes
- Interactive media: computer games, online games, video games, edutainment, interactive television
- The Internet is a mix of mass media and personal media
Regional media
Art media
- In art, the medium is the material in which an artist works (ie paint, wood, marble, steel, etc).
Cross media
Cross-media means the idea of distributing the same message through different media channels. Many authors understand cross-media publishing to be the ability to publish in both print and on the web without manual conversion effort. Because recipients have differently and have different needs, the conversion cannot be automated with the electronic means available today. An increasing number of wireless devices with mutually incompatible data and screen formats make it even more difficult to achieve the objective “create once, publish many”.
Physical object media
In biology and chemistry, a solvent serves as a medium for molecules.
A medium through which waves propagate may be classified as follows:
- Linear medium, if different waves at any particular point in the medium can be added;
- Bounded medium, if it is finite in extent, otherwise unbounded medium;
- Uniform medium, if its physical properties are unchanged at different points;
- Isotropic medium, if its physical properties are the same in different directions.
Quotations
Marshall McLuhan was famous for saying "The medium is the massage."
See also