Media Archaeology

The word “media” (singular: medium) comes from the Latin for “middle layer”, and thus is by definition the intermediate between us and the world. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term can mean anything from “a means by which something is communicated” to “the milieu in which an organism lives or is cultured” to “an agency or means of doing something” to a simple synonym of “technology.”

This course thus aims to answer the question, “What are media?” by drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship from around the globe to introduce students to philosophical, historiographical, and cultural approaches to the study of media, technology, and society — in both traditional and newer registers. Our approach to these different studies of media are not to “sample” them and have them remained discrete, but instead to draw overarching methodological conclusions about field establishment, definition, and direction.