Document Type
Editorial
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Media [pl. of medium, from the Latin noun medium, meaning ‘the middle’ or ‘the public eye’]. Although no longer one of the top buzzwords in the humanities or cultural criticism, if you prefer, ‘the media’ are still around, in the sense of both an ever more elusive and ramified empirical reality and as a conceptual field marked by the theoretical debates of several decades. Whether dealing with synchronic analysis or historical change, a specific medium or the media in general, a singular text, a group of texts or genre, studies relying on – or should we say, invoking – mediality as a concept invariably trail a number of unresolved quandaries, some of them theoretical, some methodological. Having said that, one must of course hasten to acknowledge the many serious and inspired efforts to solve these quandaries in the past, whether the issue at stakes was that of media specificity, of the social or technological construction of media (or the media’s construction of the social and technological), the economic and judicial aspects of media, or the production of meaning in a more abstract sense.
Repository Citation
Rheindorf, Markus. "An Editorial Introduction to "Reconstructing Media"." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 5, no. 2, 2005, pp. 1–5. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol5/iss2/1