ABSTRACT
This chapter reconsiders the material conditions enabling and constraining communication through different media. Despite the extraordinary flexibility of digital technologies, they lend themselves, like any tool or technology, to certain human and social uses, and not others. The chapter specifies the transformation of matter into media with reference to three main concepts: affordance, emergence, and momentum. It briefly considers contemporary culture as an emerging as well as a transitional media environment, pointing forward toward media of a fourth degree. Compared to the printing press, technologies for recording and disseminating sound came late to media history, from the 1870s onward. The contemporary digital media environment presents a special case of the general question underlying medium theory, namely, how material potentials become actual media. From the simplest of tools to the most sophisticated of the meta-technologies, media are made rather than found.
