Technology&Media&Rhetoric

MEDIUM/THINKING
This course can best be understand through the key term media. Let me explain. Generally speaking, we speak
of doing things with technology. We use it to do things. The same is typically said of rhetoric. Recall our
discussion of the weak and strong defenses of rhetoric (and technology). Rhetoric and technology, then, are
traditionally taken as simply means to an end. This class, however, engages rhetoric and technology as more the
mere tools in our hands. It is here where the word media does its work.

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”
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”


What’s compelling about this mix of definitions is that the oscillation among them points to the ways
in which any acton we accomplish takes place in a medium that makes it possible. We swim
because there is water—we float in the water. We fly because there is air—we fly through the air. We
hear and speak in and through the same. My words don’t simply fly through the air; my voice is the
air.

This course thus argues that medium thinking is something in which we can understand rhetoric and
technology. In brief, rhetoric and technology are not just as things we do things with; they are also
the media in which and through we do those things. We don’t simply do rhetoric; we are saturated
by it. We don’t merely use technology; we are immersed in it.

What is it, then, that we are doing in and through the medium? It is worth mentioning here that there is another,
perhaps equally productive definition of medium:

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.”

I find this definition productive not because the work of this class is akin to a séance (it isn’t, I promise); I find it
productive because it imagines us as media ourselves. It is through us that our compositions flow. Whatever we
have to communicate is not something that is just our own, but rather something that comes to and through us.
The ideas, images, sounds and words that we seemingly use will come to us from the media surrounding us. And
the medium we are floating in is comprised of other people, places and things.

The word medium attends to the fact that rhetoric and technology are not so much tools we
do things with but environments we do things in. We are in a medium and it is through that
medium that doing anything is more or less possible.

Nathaniel A. Rivers | English1900 | Technology, Media and Rhetoric | Fall 2019