Part 1: What is Media Theory?
“What is media theory?” — a simple question, but one without an immediate answer. It is a collection of theories about media, that much is obvious, but beyond that things get a bit murky. A medium is technically defined as an intermediary position, or as a material facilitating transition. But the terms medium and media also have various colloquial definitions.
As the field of media theory is broad, there is a practically unlimited supply of thought surrounding what exactly said field encompasses. Big name theorists like Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, and Jean Baudrillard, among other and more contemporary thinkers, have all made great strides in narrowing down the conception of what exactly it is they are actually talking about. If you would like to learn a bit more about these thinkers, you may click here to travel to another page which can satisfy this desire (if you have not encountered said page already that is). For now, though, I would like to throw my own hat into the ring, and give a personal definition that I believe at least partially approximates a clear notion of what media theory is:
I feel this definition is fairly straightforward in all but one key aspect, that being exactly what the term "information" represents. Information is a general concept that can refer to many different things in many different contexts, but at its broadest it is simply that which means something — and when that which means something is transferred from one place to another, we call it a message. But you can’t understand information all by itself, nor can you share it as a message with others; in fact, you can’t even comprehend it. Information needs a container, something to codify it, and to hold it while in transit.
That is media theory. It is the expansive and diverse assortment of theories which explain the methods by which information is stored, codified, and transferred, and we call these methods media. Anything can be a medium so long as it contains some structure by which we can identify the information it carries; even something so simple as a string of 1s and 0s is enough. Written language too is one of the more common media we use to transfer information, and is the preferred medium of this particular bit of messaging, though as you may have already guessed this is not necessarily the case everywhere on the site.
Media Theory: "The study of how information is transferred between people* or groups of people*."
* We'll get to that, don't worry.
A Definition of Media Theory by Will Bortin
All of these colloquial understandings of media are each correct in a way, but none of them represent what is studied in the field classically known as media theory, which begs the question:
What is media theory, and what media does it regard?
Some Types of Media by Will Bortin