Media in use: how the practice shapes the mediality of media

Abstract

My essay argues for a pragmatic interpretation of the concept of media in the context of the digital networked sphere. To develop my argument I start to discuss the media theories of McLuhan and Kittler and their rejection of any pragmatic understanding of media. A critical evaluation of these theories then allows me to expose my own philosophical approach to explain how social processes of media use determine the mediality of the media used.

Keywords:

• digital media
• Kittler
• McLuhan
• media philosophy
• media use
• social media

Notes on contributor

Stefan Münker is a private lecturer for media theory at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany and works for a German public service broadcaster. In 2012 he was a fellow at the Internationales Zentrum für Kultur- und Technikforschung (IZKT) at the University of Stuttgart. In 2010–2011 he had a professorship for media aesthetics at the University of Regensburg. Münker holds a doctorate in philosophy from Freie Universität Berlin and a habilitation in media science from the University of Basel. He recently published the books Emergenz digitaler Öffentlichkeiten. Die sozialen Medien des Web 2.0 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009) and Philosophie nach dem ‘Medial Turn’. Beiträge zur Theorie der Mediengesellschaft (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009) and is the co-editor of numerous books on the theory and culture of modern media.

Notes

1 The following essay uses arguments I developed over a couple of years and wrote down in different texts, none of them previously published in English (Münker 2003; 2008; 2009).

2 To highlight the fact that I am talking about the usage of the words ‘medium/media’, I use quotation marks; to highlight the fact that I am talking about the concept medium/media, I use italics.

3 Neither the German Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Gründer 1980) nor the Routledge encyclopedia of philosophy (Craig 1998) features articles about the items ‘medium’ or ‘media’. Even the more recently new edited Encyclopedia of philosophy (Borchert 2006) lacks an entry – and so does the web-based Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Zalta 2012), founded in 1995 (and updated ever since).

4 For a slightly different but still similar comparison between media and instruments see Krämer (1998b, 83).

5 In the meantime Twitter again changed its mission statement. While I write this in January 2013 the statement reads as follows: ‘Find out what's happening, right now, with the people and organizations you care about’ (https://twitter.com). Nevertheless, both older statements can still be found on the net; the statement of 2011 still is part of the description of Twitter's Android app (to be found for example at http://www.amazon.com/Twitter-­-­-Inc/dp/B004SOR4H6; last visit 24 January 2013), and the original statement of 2006 appears at the beginning of Twitter's own blog (http://blog.twitter.com/2009/11/whats-­-happening.html).