Monthly Archives: October 2025

Critical Concept Explication

Do We Sense The World… Or Does it Sense Us?

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As we navigate the world, our perception is shaped through our touch, taste, sight, sound, and smell.

But how do we understand these experiences and how does mediation play into this interaction?

In the chapter Senses, Caroline Jones explores two contrasting answers to this question. Through Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan, we can begin to understand the complexities of how our senses interpret media and the surrounding world.

Starting with our first theorist, Kittler believes that our senses are radically shaped by the media around us. His idea is fairly synonymous with ideas about technological determinism. On the opposite end of the spectrum, McLuhan insists that human senses are grounded in the body and simply extend their reach through or using media. By dissecting these opposing ideas, Jones extends these ideas to explain how media and the senses interact.

Jones’s main argument is that the senses are not natural or unchanging, but are always shaped and reshaped by media. As she puts it: “The senses both constitute our ‘sense’ of unmediated knowledge and are the first medium with which consciousness must contend.” (p. 88) While Media delivers content to our existing senses, they actively reorganize how we experience the world through touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight.

Building on the work of the two earlier thinkers, Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan, Kittler argued that media fundamentally produce and change the senses. We see this currently when smartphones reshape our attention span and even eye movement patterns from the constant flicking and scanning our eyes do, while also restructuring how we process information.

To compare, McLuhan argues that media are extensions of our senses. Take for instance, the telephone extends hearing, but our senses remain grounded in our body. Jones takes this further by showing that, across history, from ancient philosophy to modern capitalism, our senses have always been shaped by outside forces. For example, we have been conditioned to associate smell to the terms “Pine Forest” and “Country Fresh” to a clean, hygienic home.

As for vision, society has often treated sight as the most important path to truth. According to Jones, vision became privileged because philosophers, starting with Plato, saw it as the most objective sense that could reach truth from a distance. Over time, philosophy and art reinforced this by treating sight as the ‘pure’ path to knowledge, while pushing touch, taste, and smell aside as “too bodily” or “animal”.

But this ranking of sight above touch, smell, and taste is not natural because it’s something created by media and culture. Her main point is that the media are not solely neutral tools that show us the world. Instead, they actively change our senses, reshaping what we know is true and also how we actually experience reality through our bodies. And to study media, we need to perceive senses as the very ways of shaping our sense of reality.

Through the course of philosophy’s historical developments, we’ve seen a lot of fluctuations as to what counts as knowledge and the ways in which one may truly “know” something. From the philosophers of Ancient Greece – Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who regarded philosophical reasoning as the way to gain a true sight of reality. to modern-day thinkers, most infamously Hume, who rejected the concept of “universal laws”, favouring sensory experience to understand the world.

In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Plato presented prisoners shackled to the walls of a cave, where the prisoners perceive the projected shadows of objects as the objects themselves, for they can not turn around, and thus, they are unaware of the illusion being carried out. In this case, the eyes are seeing, yet the prisoner is effectively blind to the truth of reality. Their “senses” have effectively failed to distinguish between a representation of reality, its fabrication and reality itself.  Plato attributes this blindness to a lack of philosophical reasoning. Critiquing the dependency on the five senses to understand reality, and as a means to achieve true knowledge. He then proceeds to provide the remedy for this, in which the prisoner is required to be willing to be blinded once again, this time by the volitional blinding light of reality. Shown in the allegory as the eyes having to adjust to the bright sun after spending a whole life in the darkness of the cave. 

Fast-forwarding into the Enlightenment period, we have John Locke and, famously, David Hume, with his Problem of Induction, arguing that we can not know for sure that something has happened until it has happened; his idea of reality is one which can only be validated by our senses, such as the eyes or ears.

Hume argues that it is only a force of habit and custom that we assume to “know” things. For example, we do not have all the empirical data of history and the future to accurately claim that a sound is produced when we clap our hands. Human reasoning, consequently, is argued to be a cumulative process based on data from sensory experience, and this is the primary way in which we understand the world.

In concluding the chapter’s philosophical basis, Jones’ main idea that “our senses are not fixed” is strongly reinforced by a modern thinker, Karl Marx and his argument that the way our senses interact with technology and political economies form us as humans. This idea of technological determinism claims our senses are formed externally by the historical development of the world rather than internally within ourselves. Our senses are in a constant state of change and adaptation, in relation to our experience of the world.

Taking a step back to Hume, which considers media as a tool for gathering or promoting information for the senses, and is not only “the bridge in the middle” but also something that shapes and influences how people use and reconsider their senses and the world experienced through them. Media not only “outputs”, but also “inputs” through our senses. The chapter shifts our understanding of media as solely information we consume but also the force that transforms our human senses that we use to experience the world.

While the media shapes people’s perception of reality and the way we interpret our own senses, the media itself is also ever changing and replaced by new inventions and technologies. Our senses, when mediated, shift with it, and so does our conversation with the world around us. In such a context, the ability to independently think while understanding how our senses interact with media is the key of guiding us out of the cave.

Maxine Gray, Betty Liao, Nam Pham, Aubrey Ventura

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What’s The INFO On Information?

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This chapter proves that information is never neutral or stable. It is a common denominator across multiple forms, and each form reveals how we understand systems, communication, and the meaning behind them. The chapter explores virtuality, language, entropy, noise, and feedback, which highlight that information, along with being stored, also reshapes the environments that carry it. Even though information sometimes fades or persists, most often, it transforms. Theories from Saussure, Shannon, Boltzmann, and Bateson prove that information is defined less by permanence and more by probability, relation, and adaptation. Information demonstrates itself to be both constrained and filled with endless possibilities, whether through the structural logic of language, the physical principles of entropy, or the creative possibilities of noise and feedback.

​​​​​​Information: Everywhere and Nowhere

We found that one of the most intriguing parts of the chapter on virtuality is the contrast in how information was stored in the past compared to today. Physical traces such as carvings and manuscripts have been left behind and have survived for centuries. Contrastingly, digital information is extremely fragile. For example, a file can be duplicated without limitation, but it can also disappear with a click or even a forgotten password. As such, information is both everywhere and nowhere. It doesn’t necessarily have weight or size, yet it structures the way in which we perceive the world. This is where its power lies. Information can be re-coded or transformed to fit new contexts instantly. This reminds us of how much of what we create only exists temporarily; examples include Snapchat stories or disappearing messages. Blake’s idea of how these moments still carry meaning even if they don’t have a lasting trace can be applied here. What matters isn’t necessarily permanence but the way information can adapt and reshape systems.

Communication and Language

The most striking aspect of the “Language” chapter was the comparison between Shannon and Weaver’s theory of communication and Saussure’s theory of language. Despite being completely different theories, they still both show that systems matter more than the individual messages. Meaning essentially appears from the structures that shape it. Shannon and Weaver’s model treats information in terms of probability. The focus is on how predictable or unpredictable a message is within the system. Saussure also makes a similar point, as speech only makes sense in the context of the larger structure of language. This is where words have value through their position in relation to each other. For example, in the text, English is mentioned as 50% statistically predictable. Even though redundancy would sound like a flaw, it is actually what makes communication work. If every word were unpredictable, we wouldn’t be able to follow along. Even though the system constrains us, this constraint is what gives meaning and clarity.

What is Entropy? How its Connected To Energy?

Looking at how information has a significant connection to physical systems, the theorist Ludwig Boltzmann demonstrated that entropy, which measures disorder, is a physical property of a system.  Over time, systems tend towards maximum entropy, which means more disorder and less usable energy. Ordered systems are low in entropy and contain more information and less unusable energy. Using the example of a scenario of finding a hot cup of coffee on a table in a cool room instead of the usual situation of finding a cup at room temperature to explain entropy. The hot coffee in the cold room is low-entropy because the coffee won’t stay hot for long, making it an unusual situation. In contrast, a cup at room temperature is a more probable and expected state.  Boltzmann wanted to define the entropy of a physical system as a function of possible energetic configurations, the number of different possible ways to distribute more configurations and produce a random high entropy.  Boltzmann quantification of the entropy law, creating the equation S = k log P, with S standing for the entropy and P being the number of different possibilities.

How We Use Entropy in Communication Systems

Looking further at the link with statistical mechanics, Shannon defined information as the mathematical inverse of probability. The more surprising it is, the more information it contains. For example, choosing from a binary set (yes/no, on/off) provides one bit of information, but not a lot, because the options at the source are very limited. In this way, the value of information is calculated: the more choices a sender has, the more information the message carries. In the approach to calculate the value of information, considering how many choices the sender has and how much information the message may contain, Shannon created a mathematical formulation of information H = –∑ pi log pi. Pi being the probability of choice, H is if the choice is predictable. Information theory explains how unlikely order shifts to probable disorder in physical systems, distinguishing between signals (useful) and noise (waste) in communication. In physical systems, thermodynamic entropy is the amount of energy unavailable for further work, or “wasted”. In communication systems, the informational entropy of a message measures the message probabilities from different perspectives

– The source: how many choices are possible

– The channel: the amount of signal transmitted versus the amount lost in noise

– The destination: how much uncertainty the message resolves for the receiver.

Through the development of reception theory, reader response theory and cognitive science, which have focused on how people interpret information through different ways of communication. 

Media Systems and Noise

The author, Bruce Clarke, positions media not as neutral tools for transmission but as dynamic systems embedded in material and environmental contexts. His liking for systems theory is evident in the way the chapter frames all meaningful communication as occurring within cycles of transmission and reception, where signals and noise are always present. Noise is defined as anything in a received message that was not originally sent. It was first treated as an obstacle to efficiency, described by Shannon as random interference that disrupts productivity. However, he and Weaver also recognized that noise introduces new probabilities into the system and can be understood as information itself. Gregory Bateson sharpened this point with his definition of information as “[…] a difference that makes a difference”(165). Noise unsettles transmitted messages, creating the potential for new forms and information to emerge.

Norbert Wiener’s definition of cybernetics as the study of messages and control highlights why noise matters. Both machines and biological organisms regulate themselves through circuits of transmission and feedback. Signals travelling through these circuits are never perfectly stable; real-world channels, be that nerves or telephone wires, always contain random fluctuations or noise. Just as thermodynamic systems lend themselves toward entropy, communication systems face the inevitability of noise. What begins as a problem of error or interruption can quickly become a creative opportunity: systems learn and evolve because they must adapt to noise.

This is most clearly visible in media arts. What engineers once feared as breakdowns or flaws often became the raw material for innovation. Musicians like Jimi Hendrix transformed screeching feedback into controlled musical enhancements, while tape manipulation and distortion gave artists like the Beatles new expressive vocabularies. In these cases, noise was not a loss but a generative supplement to the message. Visual media can carry similar outcomes: glitches in video or digital photography can become aesthetic choices, reframing errors as features. Media art reveals that meaning is often made through the manipulation of noise, not its elimination.

Early communication systems, such as the telegraph and telephone, prioritize noiseless transmission, aiming to reduce distortion, while inscription media such as the phonograph or photograph captured and preserved both signal and noise. Friedrich Kittler shows how these technologies disrupted the dominance of writing, which reduces speech to 26 symbols (letters) and filters out the messy world of accidental sound. In contrast, sound recording and photography preserved continuous reality, complete with its imperfections. This created a conceptual divide: symbolic systems that treat information as immaterial code, and material systems that capture the world’s natural, noisy textures. However, symbolic and material systems are never fully separate. Information only comes into being when it takes material form, whether in carved stone or cloud servers. The qualities of these materials determine what endures, what decays, and what remains accessible.

Noise is not the enemy of communication but a structural feature of it. Sometimes it destroys order, but just as often it enables creativity, adaptation, and novelty. Media systems are ecological: they consist of signals, noise, and the environments that sustain them. Recognizing this prepares us for the cybernetic concept of feedback, where noise and uncertainty are not filtered out but re-circulated through the system, enabling regulation, adaptation, and, at times, the discovery of entirely new patterns.

Introduction of Feedback in Information Systems

Information has shifted not just to store or transmit, but to be used to create a new function of feedback. Noting that information theories define information as a mathematically inverse function of the probability of a predictable message. Bateson stated that noise is the only possible source of new patterns or information, highlighting how noise always carries meaning, even if it seems meaningless to the audience. During the 1940s, as computers were being developed, feedback became a crucial part of control mechanisms. With certain sensors, both input and output can be managed by converting them into a circuit, creating a feedback loop that uses its own output as an input. This results in either negative feedback, which stabilizes order, or positive feedback, which leads to growth or disorder. Uncertainties about messages allowed noise to serve as a source of additional information, introducing unexpected patterns useful for creative or adaptive purposes. Feedback transforms transmission into a dynamic process that enables systems to self-regulate, discover new patterns, and produce art.

Key Takeaways

Media should be understood not merely as channels for transmitting information, but as dynamic systems in which signals and noise interact within material and environmental contexts. Clarke emphasizes that meaning arises from relationships within these systems, what Bateson calls the “context principle”, and that communication is impossible without context. Information is never neutral. It moves, transforms, and reshapes the systems it inhabits. Media are not just channels for messages but dynamic, ecological systems where signals and noise coexist, and new meaning emerges from the appearance of noise. Noise is not simply interference but a generative force that shapes, disrupts, and enriches meaning. By situating media within ecological systems, Clarke challenges the notion of isolated tools and instead presents them as active participants that both shape and are shaped by the information around them.

Work Cited

Title cover and Images created in Canva By Alisha and Sam

Clarke, Bruce. “Information.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 157-171. Accessed 1 October 2025.


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Art and Reproducing the Human Experience

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How do we consider a piece to be a work of art? 

How do we differentiate between mass media and fine art? 

Is it the time and effort put into the piece? 

Is it the materials used? 

Or, is it the meanings and interpretations that surround the work? 

These are all questions American scholar Johanna Drucker tackles in her chapter from Critical Terms for Media Studies. 

Art has long been recognized as a concept that is difficult to define. We often hear the saying “art is subjective,” and that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” So, if the term “art” is so complex and personal, why attempt to define it at all? In an era of mass media and reproduction, it is important for us, as media studies students, to understand what makes art valuable.

The methods by which modern artists create are very distant from what was originally used to classify works as pieces of art. These previous conventions included: 

  1. Art as a Set of Practices and a Class of Objects 

Modern artists are no longer limiting themselves to traditional materials and methods once used to create art. Instead of using paint or clay to create a piece, artists are now incorporating digital media into their work. This means art can no longer be classified solely on the basis of its making. 

  1. Mass Media vs Fine Art

Before, there was a clear boundary between “fine art” and “mass media.” Now that we are living in an age where reproduction is limitless and our access to images is immediate, those lines have now become blurred. Iconography, themes, and technology that are largely associated with “popular culture” or “commercial media” have now made their way into contemporary art practices.

  1. The Idea of an “Artist”

In the past, the classical idea of an “artist” revolved around being some sort of genius. They were trained professionals with formal skills who adhered to traditional notions of beauty, harmony, and proportion. However, these skills are no longer required to be given the title of an “artist.” Present-day artists instead explore diverse media and forms, not needing conventional skills. 

  1.  The Role of Fine Art

Art no longer has to establish aspirations toward “higher” values (spiritual messages or moral grandeur). Now art is no longer conforming to fixed genres, just as it is no longer being crafted from elite materials. 

Drucker starts off the chapter with a quote by Charles Ogden from The Foundations of Aesthetics: “Art is the exploitation of the medium.” Beginning the chapter with this quote establishes the important role media plays when defining art. The definition of art, as Drucker suggests, is never going to be fixed; it will shift along with the media through which they are expressed.

History of the Term “Art”: 

In the foundational understanding of art, the medium allows for the very existence of art. 

Image credit

As the chapter unfolds, the author guides us through the evolution of the definition of “art” across different time periods. As art expanded beyond technical perfection to embrace ideas and personal expression, the meaning of its media expanded as well.

The Classical Period shows us an art form that was primarily associated with applied skill. At this stage, individual talent wasn’t connected to personal expression. Instead, form followed a strict sense of aesthetic, and we can see this clearly in the work of sculptors like Praxiteles in the 4th century BCE.

Moving into the Medieval Period, we see artistic skills applied to more specialized tasks – things like illumination, calligraphy, painting, drawing, and bookbinding. Importantly, art was not yet recognized as a separate domain in itself, but rather as a craft embedded in other practices.

The Renaissance is where the idea of the artist as a gifted individual really emerges. Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, published in 1550, cemented the notion of the artist as a kind of genius. Figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo embody this new artistic ideal, where personal vision and technical skill were celebrated together.

During the Romantic Period, the emphasis shifted toward imagination and emotion. William Blake, for instance, highlighted art’s power to open “doors of perception.” Art was no longer just about beauty or mastery – it became a way to challenge the rationality of the Enlightenment (Adorno, anyone?).

Finally, in the Modern and Postmodern periods, we see radical shifts in how art relates to media. Pablo Picasso disrupted traditional artistic representation with collage. Marcel Duchamp pushed even further with conceptual art, famously exhibiting a porcelain urinal as artwork. And Andy Warhol brought mass media and popular culture into frame, blurring the lines between high art and commercial imagery.

Through these shifts, the chapter shows how the definition of art and its relationship to media have continually evolved, reflecting broader cultural values and reshaping what we consider art to be.

Defining Art

As the chapter progresses, Drucker starts to formulate two key definitions of art, both of which directly correlate with the evolutions of art’s role, technical definition, and position of the artist themself. 

The first is art as autonomous, first introduced by philosophers of the Frankfurt School in the early 20th century- most notably, Walter Benjamin. His 1937 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, expands on this idea by introducing the concept of “aura,” a unique, unintelligible quality an original work holds, and cannot be replicated by mass media reproductions. This idea of aura was then expanded upon as a method of preserving older values through defamiliarization, the idea of not viewing a work through its original context, but informing a newer audience of the time and space it was conceptualized in. 

This theory was not only employed by Benjamin and his contemporaries such as Adorno and Horkheimer, but also by the cultural critic Clement Greenberg. In his essay, Avant Garde and Kitsch, he argued that fine art was to be used as a preservation of civilization in the fight against mass culture, insisting that the visual flatness of art was characteristic of its autonomy, in its ability to separate past capsules of time through art from ever evolving, ever shifting ideology.

Although Greenberg’s writings championed experimental fine art as the perfect cocktail of aesthetics and values to capture the present, his insistence of visuality was criticized as being despotic in its desire to critique ideological references and narrative qualities. Through this criticism, another definition was born- Art as conceptual, based not on formal principles and technicality, but on the individual ideas and concepts the artists employed. The origination of this school of thought can be traced back to Duchamp, in his work’s suggestion that art is not founded off of technical ability or formal principles, but off of conventions of thought and ideology. However, this definition started to go mainstream in the 50s and 60s, with artists and writers equally examining the concepts behind a piece as much as its material form. 

A quote that may encapsulate this definition best is Sol LeWitt’s, “An idea is a machine that makes art,” written in a 1967 essay, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art. Critic Lucy Lippard expanded on this further, observing the concepts of dematerialization within the art of the day- noting that artists were viewing material form as secondary to the work’s concept. Media that otherwise would not be used in a work started to be introduced in wanting to represent the artist’s ideas and concepts as purely as possible. Most audaciously- in the case of Yves Klein’s exhibition Void (1958), where he famously showed it was not the medium, but rather the lack thereof that made a piece luminous in its conceptuality- making it possible to enforce his ideas of direct, tangible presence and concept without the burden of medium.

This definition was not free without criticism, however. In one of her earliest works from 1966, Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag argued that modern art criticism was too focused with attempting to decode a work’s concepts, meaning, and ideas, sacrificing the fostering of direct, felt, sensuous experience in the attempt to make art decomposition an intellectual exercise of translation. But today, exemplified in contemporary art’s ideals of unorthodox media and materials, a colliding definition of fine art and mass production, and an emphasis on conceptual expression over strict formalism, the definition of art as conceptual lives on.

Takeaways 

The meaning of art and media will never be fixed; it shifts as culture evolves and as we, the audience, reshape what we consider “art.” 

In the modern and contemporary periods, our perception of media has moved on from being at the service of art to becoming the very subject and substance of artistic creations. In other words, instead of merely carrying the artist’s message, the medium began to gain recognition as an artistic presence in itself.

In the final pages of the chapter, Johanna invites us to reinterpret the chapter’s opening claim, “Art is the exploitation of the medium”. 

“‘Medium is a message.’ But it is the art coefficient that provokes wonder and seduces us into consideration of the way it inflects and shapes meaning”. By identifying art as the ‘coefficient’ of the medium rather than the central figure of the piece, the traditional hierarchy between art and medium is redefined. In this sense, art can be understood as a ‘meta-medium’: a tool that engages the audience and invites them to consider the potential and power of the medium itself.

Her final statement, “Art becomes a way of paying attention”, ties it all together beautifully. Art is now defined less by its materials or composition, and more by the way it is interpreted as being tangibly different from an everyday product of a different cultural industry, marked by its uniqueness to the artist and its context.Since our existence as humans is mediated by perception, shaped by personal and cultural backgrounds, art really is everywhere. It emerges whenever we choose to slow down, pay attention, and wherever we find beauty and meaning.

Sources:

Mitchell, W. J. T., Hansen, M. B. N., & Drucker, J. (2010). Art. In Critical terms for media studies. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226532660.001.0001

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Not Just Messages: How Communication Creates Meaning

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Introduction 

Ever find yourself filling out a job application with a drop-down menu to select your major — scrolling down and down until you find it — ‘Communications & Media Studies?’ Employers and schools alike tend to click together the terms, whether for ease of pairing the two related terms or for a lack of understanding into the nuances that define the disciplines. Are there even differences if those who confer degrees write them on the same line?

Realistically, communications is both a critical dimension & point of study for media studies and also an entirely separate field. It’s why Bruce Clarke uses his chapter on Communication in Critical Terms for Media Studies to both introduce how the word and concept shapes the two disciplines (2010).s

A Definition to Work With

Communication — as a word, not a discipline —  is derived from the Latin word communicare, referring to the act of imparting or making something common. The Oxford English Dictionary builds their definition from this; “the imparting, conveying, or exchange of ideas, knowledge, [and] information (OED.”) While the English verb implies the intentional transmission of a conception, the noun word refers instead to the material and spatial object of such an impartation. Put in other words, the object of communication is what a medium is (Clarke 2020). 

Development into Disciplines

Prior to the Industrial revolution of the mid-1800s, the study of communication was otherwise incorporated in other disciplines such as philosophy (Peters 1999). Mechanical technology flourished unprecedentedly and expanded human’s intellectual, spatial, and temporal boundaries similarly. Foreign colonies and countries became connected by their media, transitioning the globe into a community through innovations like telegraphs, phones, and radios. Around a century later, Marshall McLuhan argued the two as distinct realms of study, both equally deserving of attention. To the time of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949) formalizing their namesake transmission-reception model of communication — a system built around media having their meanings embedded and static until received  —  McLuhan wrote such media are vessels of “information movement” in a society, constituting “extension[s] of man” in the physical world (1994, 89-90).

Published during a period when television became common in households, McLuhan’s attention to mediums themselves proved inspiring to those fascinated by the abundance of these multisensory devices. Contemporaries began conceiving contrasting frameworks, presenting one with meanings driven by reflexive aspects instead of solely by messages encoded (Craig, 2001). This constitutive model, defined by its recognition of social factors, opposes the media-focussed model. With this said, the line between communication studies and media can be said as focus being paid to these social factors in the former and to the technology and formal contents itself. 

Transmission as a Framework of Control

The transmission model is often simplified to the movement of information from one place to another, but this understanding is too narrow. As McLuhan reminded us, every medium not only carries content but also subtly reshapes the roles of the sender and receiver, altering the structures of power and control. From this perspective, transmission is not merely about delivering a message—it organizes the entire process of communication by establishing expectations for clarity, directionality, and authority. It is precisely this organizing function that enables institutions like journalism, education, and the military to treat communication as something that can be standardized and managed.

Transmission in Everyday Communication

When you send a text message to a friend, you compose the message, press send, and wait for it to appear on their phone. If the message is successfully delivered, communication is considered to have succeeded. If it does not arrive, for example, due to signal failure, it is regarded as a breakdown. This simple process reflects the logic of the transmission model, in which communication is viewed as the creation, sending, and receiving of a message.

As Chang points out, this model has limitations. It gives the impression that communication only succeeds when the receiver gets the message exactly as the sender intended. However, in real life, messages are often interpreted in different ways. Even a simple text can be misunderstood depending on tone or context. Chang reminds us that the transmission model values perfect sameness, but actual communication is often full of small differences. This gap reveals both the usefulness and the limitations of transmission in explaining how we connect with each other.

Linking Communication and Media

The transmission model also clearly reveals the intrinsic coupling between communication and media: communication is the act of sending and receiving information, while media is the technical means that enables this act. In practice, the two are inseparable. Whether it is print, telegraph, or digital platforms, the chosen channel not only determines the reach and speed of information dissemination but also fundamentally shapes the form of communication. Thus, the media is by no means a passive or neutral conduit—it actively defines the patterns and boundaries of communication.

Constitutive Model — MEANING is not “SENT” but “CREATED” 

In the previous chapter, we pursued an idea of communication, which is  “a sender sends a message, a receiver receives it.” However, Clarke’s approach explains the quite different communication from this ── “Constitutive Model.” This model fundamentally challenges this premise and offers a perspective that interprets communication itself as a process of creating reality and constructing meaning. In other words, rather than viewing communication as the “transmission of a fixed meaning,” he emphasizes “what is created through communicative interactions.”

Example of Constitutive Model

In this blog post, I would like to explain an example I couldn’t explain in my presentation to make  the “Constitutive Model” easier to understand. One example is news reporting. When considering a news report, even if it appears to convey the same facts in all press, interpretations can vary greatly depending on the choice of vocabulary, context, and audience, and social relationships are shaped accordingly. In other words, even if it appears to convey the facts, the meaning can change significantly depending on the choice of expression.

Thus, in the constitutive model, the sender, receiver, and message are not pre-fixed but are reconstructed within the act of communication itself. This model has been proposed as an alternative framework by contemporary theorists such as Robert Craig (1999). Researchers such as Craig have positioned communication as a reflective and dynamic process.

Communication and Digital Media

What I wanted to add to this constitutive model is an insight into communication and digital media. Real-time communication technologies such as telephone and television enable instant interaction. On the other hand, storage media such as text and video preserve information for later reference. Amid the emergence of these media, it has been argued that digital media possessed the characteristics of both.

Considering this in conjunction with Craig’s constitutive model, we can conclude that digital media enable the simultaneous transmission and preservation of information, with meanings constantly changing during the communication process.

Communication in Larger Society 

Subsequently in this chapter, we are introduced to Jürgen Habermas’ theories by Bruce Clarke, along with those of Briankle Chang and Niklas Luhmann. These were not presented as merely scholarly differences but as methods of framing a deeper question around how we could possibly understand communication within society in general. In our presentation, we were only able to present a brief overview due to time limitations, but here I would like to dig a little deeper.

Habermas and the Public Sphere

Habermas’s communicative rationality theory is especially important as a foundation for democratic public spheres. In Habermas’s opinion, people use language to exchange ideas, critique each other and bargain for mutual understanding. This goes beyond individual subjectivity and aims to create common rationality in public life. We did touch on this during our presentation but did not get a chance to connect it to the digital public sphere. On social media, the people of today now criticize and quarrel with each other in real time, but at the same time, these platforms tend to break down into echo chambers and polarization. The gap between Habermas’s idea of consensus and the fragmented reality of discussion online is worth noting.

Chang and the Limits of Intersubjectivity

Chang’s own critique of intersubjectivity must also be addressed with some additional attention. He asserts that communication can’t be a copying of ideas from mind to mind. Instead there is always difference, slippage and ambiguity between understanding. In our presentation we have only alluded to his claim that intersubjectivity is circular. What I would prefer that we had emphasized more is that Chang’s account renders difference a productive resource. Meaning lies not in sameness but in difference. News reporting is one such area. Facts are the same but interpretation varies based on vocabulary, framing and audience. These generate new discourse and not shut them off.

Luhmann and Social Systems

Luhmann develops this concept further with his theory of social systems. Society, he states, is not a space of shared meaning but is the ever-present continuation of communication itself. Only communication can communicate, he states. Messages in this model are not transmitted whole from one brain to another. Instead each system generates meaning internally. Communication goes on as long as one message produces another. Misunderstanding or conflict does not stop society, it keeps it going. We can see this quite clearly in social media arguments, where misunderstanding often gives rise to new rounds of controversy and interpretation.

Connecting to Networks

Here Clarke’s chapter overlaps with another in Critical Terms, Alexander Galloway’s “Networks.” Networks characterize society as a network of nodes and connections, where each message gets its meaning based on how it relates to the others. Based on this perspective Habermas’s aspiration for consensus can only be seen in fragments, and Chang’s emphasis on difference aligns with the diversity of nodes in a network. Luhmann’s chain of communication is consistent with Galloway’s view that decentralized and distributive structures put society in motion. Together, Communication and Networks reveal that meaning is not the fixed transmission of ideas but the ongoing generative process in the web of social relations.

Thank you for reading this blog ⭐️!

Critical Concept Explication

Writing Is Infrastructure: From Clay Tablets to Code

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What would our world look like without writing? From establishing communities to the endless scrolls of texts on our phones, it is easy to overlook that writing has an insurmountable presence in our everyday lives. Media theorist Lydia H. Liu’s chapter, Writing, reminds us that writing is more than a writing tool for recording speech. It is a material technology and symbolic system, tracing its influence from the rise of civilisations to the digital age. In her discussion, Liu poses six central questions: the origins of writing, its role in governance, the relationship between scripts and systems, its evolution across different media, writing as a visual representation of speech, and its place in the digital age, to highlight how writing expands beyond being a tool for speech. The chapter ultimately demonstrates how deeply writing is intertwined with power, communication, and human imagination.

Origins of writing

Liu first focuses on the discourse on the ‘origins’ of writing to explain the first influences of writing in social systems and innovation. The first traces of scripts were found to have been invented separately in four different parts of the world, where each was characterised by urbanisation, division of labour, and a surplus economy. It is clear that writing was not just a product of culture, but also a practical innovation that emerged out of increasingly complex societies.

Each script is tied to material media (such as clay tablets, petroglyphs, and papyrus), highlighting how writing is also deeply technological and evolving alongside infrastructures of communication. Before these early scriptures, however, emerged semasiographs, or the use of iconic signs as a means of writing and communication. These forms of communication were first disregarded as writing by German linguist Florian Coulmas, who argued that all forms of graphic meaning, such as visual movement, syntax-like patterns, or rhythm, were not considered as being tied to writing. However, this classification evolved through the widespread use of the rebus principle, where a picture can be used to represent the sound of its name, rather than the object itself, marking a conceptual progression to non-language instances of illustration as writing. The chapter thus argues that there is no exact origin point of writing.

However, it is clear through early scripture that writing has evolved out of broader conditions of labour and communication. French archaeologist Andrè Leroi-Gourhan’s palaeontology of writing best supports Liu’s argument. In Gesture and Speech, Leroi-Gourhan studies early human ancestors to understand how their behaviour may relate to language. Here, he emphasises the neurological connection that the same parts of the brain are involved in tactile activities and using tools and also in the face and language. He uses the term ‘graphism’ to highlight this tactile, non-verbal form of communication to conclude that tool-making and language evolve alongside each other within human social life, where gesture and speech are intertwined, rather than being mutually exclusive.  

Writing in Governance

Connecting to Liu’s previous argument, it is clear that the early development of writing enabled new forms of organisation beyond oral traditions, easily seen as a symbol of knowledge and power across civilisations. Even early forms of storytelling prove that early civilisations understood the significance of writing through myths, legends and religion. Stories would characterise it as a ‘magical power,’ which later came to fruition as those who were literate and had access to writing held a monopoly on religious and political power in the form of Priests of the church. With this power, writing often allowed for the creation of new spatial and temporal configurations, as empires could easily sustain large colonies across far distances through written communication. This type of mass media production, as mentioned previously also in Chapter 18, ‘Mass Media’, can be seen in the monarchies of Egypt, Persia, and the Roman Empire. China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang of the Qin Dynasty, first proclaimed power through writing and scripture, where he imposed a standard script, orthography, and bureaucratic procedures for centralised rule. This started China’s long imperial history, and clearly would not have been possible if standard written script systems had not supported imperial rulers. 

Writing & Mathematics 

The development of ancient writing had strong early ties to predate methods for accurate tracking of numerical notation and record keeping, including weights, measures, and currency. Within the means of predated numerical notation, the earliest recorded transactions, dating back thousands of years, used pebbles, tallies, tokens, and clay containers or “bullae” — used in ancient Mesopotamia to show the marks of sealings indicating ownership to anything that was attached to it. In turn, this has led theorists to consider mathematics as the earliest precursor to writing. 

Though the consensus remains that writing has gone from pictographic to syllabic, and then to phoneticization, there remains the possibility that writing systems may have come from more semiotic scenarios rather than solely to record human speech. The etymology of the Phoenician word “spr” traces back to the English word “scribe.” The early meaning of the Phoenician word meant “to count”, but only later did it adopt the meaning of “to write.” The mutual ancestry between these words suggests that the alphabet and alphanumerical systems were the same. The ancient Greeks’  alphabet was already made up on the foundation of mathematics with its 24-letter system plus 3 alphanumeric signs of “digamma, koppi, and sampi” as well. 

The Global Evolution of Writing

Throughout time, the concept of writing has undergone extraordinarily vast changes from what we knew of it then to now: going back from using natural materials such as bronze, shells, or papyrus to the invention of print or electronic chips. Examining the global evolution of writing can be divided into the various empires throughout history. For instance, Ancient Egypt’s hieroglyphs were chiselled decoratively onto stone monuments, whereas writing on papyrus allowed for cursive of hieratic forms for quicker writing — the latter writing medium causing a large change in manuscript culture that shifted the forms of political organisation in history. The Roman Empire’s tradition of using papyrus “supported an emphasis on centralised bureaucratic administration,” whereas parchment in medieval Europe “helped give the church a monopoly of knowledge through monasticism,” according to Harold A. Innis. 

In Ancient China, the spread of Buddhism in the nation also prompted the invention of woodblock printing in the eighth century, where the mass production of printed books assisted in global socioeconomic transformation. Around the eleventh century, movable type was invented, a technology adopted in the printing of the earliest paper currency, which was used to hold control over the early economy in Asia as a whole. Over in Europe, around the fourteenth century, block printing and paper manufacturing came about as a result of the Mongol Empire’s westward expansion. This breakthrough translated into a rise in universal literacy, newspapers, advertising, and new forms of politics. 

Marshall McLuhan had observed the grand impact of printing on life in Europe and beyond, writing in the Gutenberg Galaxy, “the invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly line, and the first mass-production.” Thus, writing, in a sense, was the catalyst for all industrial practices to come after it, from its process of repetition to create a product for mass distribution.

Counting, notation, procedure: the road to algorithms

A second origin runs through numbers. Place-value numerals and operator symbols compress messy realities into portable strings. That compression invites procedures, do-this-then-that recipes someone else can repeat. In Liu’s telling, counting and inscribing were never far apart; even the word histories of “scribe” and “to count” cross. The point isn’t romantic; it’s practical: notation is writing tuned for calculation, a crucial bridge from tablets to code.

Materials change the message: paper, print, silicon

Writing’s substrates, bone, clay, papyrus, parchment, paper, type, and chips, aren’t background scenery. They reset speed, cost, and sameness, and with them, institutions. Paper and printing (in different historical paths) widened access; movable type accelerated repeatable precision and the rise of news, advertising, and mass politics. In the digital turn, text becomes addressable strings: searchable, sortable, and automatable, governed by file schemas, encodings, and protocols rather than just by clerks and courts.

Code is written—with machine readers

Alphabets loosely map signs to sounds; code maps signs to exact machine actions. In digital systems, a letter like “A” is an encoded value that can be copied without drift, checked for error, and executed in logic. Liu shows how modern information theory recasts “writing” as a statistical alphabet (including “space”) that machines can transmit and transform. Once marks are standardised for machines, the politics of writing shifts toward standards and interfaces, which set the fields, defaults, and labels that shape what’s sayable and searchable.

Tensions & connections (what ties the theories together) 

Speech-first vs. writing’s autonomy. A familiar hierarchy puts speech above writing. Our line, following Liu, flips the emphasis: writing has its own powers, coordination, inscription, calculability, that don’t depend on sounding like talk. This helps explain why ledgers, forms, and code can rearrange life without saying a word aloud.

Meaning vs. transmission. Engineering models treat writing as signals under noise, so messages travel reliably. That’s perfect for networks but thin on meaning; the trade-off is that standards (encodings, protocols, moderation rules) become the new chokepoints. The connection: what keeps symbols moving also decides which symbols move.

Media materials vs. institutions. Tools and substrates (brush, type, chip) shape what can be stored and processed; institutions harden around those capacities (schools, archives, platforms). This links McLuhan/Kittler-style media arguments to Liu’s core claim: writing is a world-building technology, not a transparent mirror.

Why this matters now

Change the format and you change the world: a new field on a platform form, a new label in a database, a tweak to an encoding, all are tiny acts of infrastructural authorship that decide what appears, what counts, and who gets heard. That’s writing’s power, from clay to code.

Summary: 

  • No single origin. Writing didn’t just copy speech; it stabilised agreements and memories so complex societies could form.
  • Power needs paperwork. Standard scripts and formats make populations legible—and governable.
  • Notation –  procedure – algorithms. Compression invites repeatable methods; that’s the seed of software.
  • Media matters. Substrate shifts (paper, print, silicon) rewire institutions and publics.
  • Code extends writing. Machine-readable marks turn literacy into a fight over standards, schemas, and interfaces.