ABSTRACT
The word ‘medium’, in its most literal sense, simply means the middle, something in between. Media do not merely exist in their own right; rather they connect, they transport, they transform. Whether we are speaking of relations between people, or relations between things, we are speaking of processes of mediation. ‘There is’, as Serres (1982: 63) writes, ‘always a mediate, a middle, an intermediary.’ Described in the broadest possible terms, media studies, then, is precisely the examination and elucidation of this middle. In one respect, this is quite a banal observation and tells us little concrete about the object of study in a field that has never been especially well defined or demarcated. Yet does not this lack of clear definition, the amorphousness of a discipline that constantly traverses and transgresses disciplinary boundaries, in itself indicate precisely the profound importance of the middle to media studies? This is a discipline that sits indeterminably between the humanities and the social sciences, between an engagement with the creative industries and a critique of their influence, between numerous media objects – newspapers, film, television, video, computing, gaming, through to broader historical ecologies – all of which refract a multiplicity of perspectives on the world, between an affirmation of media determinism and a determination to transcend such impediments, between media as they are and what media could be.
