Is the Web a Medium?

I blogged yesterday about why I think the Web isn’t a medium. My comment “A medium is something we send messages through whereas our talk of the Web indicates that we move through the Web — we go places, we surf, we enter sites” drew this response from C. McClellan

This is a very narrow definition of medium. Water is the medium through which a fish moves and in which it lives. All previous definitions seem to have been trampled underfoot and forgotten. Medium is not always equivalent to the various forms of broadcasting which dominate our society.

That said, the whole discussion of what the web is or isn’t has gotten pretty silly. People will continue to use it as they see fit, and it will evolve as it must, regardless of how it is defined.

Yes, the term “medium” has many meanings. What word doesn’t? But, our culture has broadly accepted the Whorfian idea that meaning / information / a message is transported between two points via a medium; that’s why “The medium is the message” was such a powerful meme. In the context of communications, a medium is not like the fish’s water. And, given the context, that is the understanding against which I was arguing. (Ok, “arguing” is a bit of a stretch. “Proclaiming,” perhaps.)

As for who gets to define what the Web is: No one. Who gets to try to understand it? Everyone. (And I don’t think it’s silly to try.) Who gets to stipulate a new metaphor? No one. Who gets to try out new metaphors to see if they throw light on the topic? Everyone. Who gets to ask questions which he then answers? Apparently me. Who gets tired of this rhetorical device rather quickly? Everyone.

Jennifer Balderama also isn’t entirely taken in by the notion that the Web isn’t a medium. As almost always, it comes to what you mean by the term. So, let me recast my comment: The Web isn’t primarily something through which we send messages. It is a space we go through.

But Jennifer anticipates this, writing:

But the fact is that I’m still physically sitting here in my chair…We use “go to” and “surf” to describe our actions because they are the terms familiar to us that best simulate our clicking from spot to spot on the Web.

Yes, but we use those terms because they somehow seem to fit our experience of the Web. It’s navigable. And in our real world experience, navigable things tend to be spaces. And how did “spot” get into Jennifer”s description? If the Web has spots, it has spaces (or, possibly, measles, but I don’t think that’s what she means.) So, it still seems to me that there’s something importantly spatial about the Web, although it’s not clear exactly what.

As for us moving through the Web, yeah, I admit it’s a stretch. But I’m not sure it’s the wrong stretch. It obviously requires some hand-waving about what a “self” is, but waving hands is how big planes get parked. (Block that metaphor!)

Categories: Uncategorized dw