Yana's Response

[Anonymous]

#413

“And so again, our bodies – our primary media..are not fixed…we come to be always already embedded, embodied in mediation.”

This passage evokes a desire to explore  the relationship between the concepts of media, medium, and mediation – which share a common root, but I’ve hitherto conceieved of them quite separately. Perhaps the connections and distinctions between these juxtaposed terms can add a layer of insight into the ways we produce, consume, and experience who we are.

If media is a cultural product composed of textual, visual, aural medium, it is a vehicle for transmission of information, demands, commands, ideals, prohibitions, humiliations, desires, connections, identities, and emotion. If a medium is the stuff with which media is composed of, that it is a) an inert static piece of raw material or b) a technology with which to produce visual or aural information, then a medium is also a piece of media. Mediums are also the vehicle or conduit through which information must pass in order to be perceived by a subject, the spatially or conceptually middle area between two objects. I’ve understood mediation to be this entire process –  in which media is transmitted via a medium in order to be perceived. But if the two concepts slip of media and medium slip into each other, where a body can be media and a medium, where a body can be the perceiver of media and is the creator of media, where media must be perceived by our bodies to have any signification, then these categories get tricky.

Perhaps the tension we experience around the amount of absorption and creation of media technologies we interface with can be thought of as a kind of unease between ourselves as passive recipients of something we create, crave, and that creates us. Though the word “bridge” in the passage from Gloria Anzaldua below might be closer to the way we generally think about mediation, one can also easily replace the word “bridge” with “media”, muddying the distinction between mediation and media as well, describing the dis-ease we feel in the digital age:

Bridges span threshold (liminal) spaces between worlds, spaces I call Napantla, a Nuahatl word meaning tierra entre medio. Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition lacking clear boundaries. Napantla es tierra desonocida, and living in this liminal zone means being in a constant state of displacement–an uncomfortable, even alarming feeling. Most of us dwell in Napantla so much of the time that it becomes a sort of “home.”

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