[Air-l] Internet as medium with different sub-media or channels?

[Mark D. Johns]

elw at stderr.org wrote:
> anybody else got a paradigm in mind that they think relates this stuff?

Joshua Meyrowitz in "Multiple Media Literacies" (Journal of 
Communication, 48(1),[Winter 1998] pp. 96-109) suggests at least three 
ways of conceiving of a medium of mass communication, advocating a 
model, based on the work of McLuhan and Ong, which includes the 
technology, the communicators as human subjects, and the culture in 
which they live. This rather expansive definition creates an 
understanding that the technology is just one component of a much larger 
system, or in Meyrowitz's terms, "an environment." One certainly 
interacts with others differently in the environment of web surfing than 
in the environment of IMing, for example. There are different 
expectations, different assumptions, and different effects.
-- 
Mark D. Johns, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication Studies
Luther College, Decorah, Iowa
http://academic.luther.edu/~johnsmar/
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"Get the facts first. You can distort them later."
     ---Mark Twain