Investigating Media

The Technology That Stands Between Us and the Natural World 

The development of ideas and a desire to communicate them are defining characteristics of humanity.

We are a tool-building species, and the technology we design to store and transmit ideas, we call media.

Early media worked across time, preserving ideas on stone or clay. With the advent of digital technology, media systems became less permanent but offered us the ability to transfer our ideas across space in increasingly shorter periods of time.

Media technology provides a perspective on our world, a layer of experience with its own rules and it's own characteristics. From the words within a book that conjure new worlds within our minds to live video footage of a remote event that influences our social and political decisions. 

We are now able to design systems previously only imagined in science fiction. 

For the first time in human history, our technology has the ability to produce ideas and to act on these ideas independently. We find ourselves in a curious situation where we are encouraged to negotiate with technology that we might once have considered, a tool.

Media is important to us and it increasingly shapes our understanding of the world. But the design of media systems influences the ideas we choose to communicate and the forms in which we express them.

Media plays an increasingly important role in influencing how our information is generated, stored, shared, received, and understood.