Welcome to

The Media Space

Communication. We may sleep more than we communicate, but if we do, its probably the only thing we spend more time doing than we spend communicating. Some argue that we are genetically predisposed to communicate, and the first act of nearly every new born baby, crying, is also their first step into the world of communicating. Our communication is second nature to us. We most often do it without thinking about either how we do it or what is necessary in order for us to do it. Indeed, we think of communication as so simple, obvious, and natural that we assume that communication with alien species (see, for examples, Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, and other movies and television series) will also be simple, obvious, and natural. We do this, ironically enough, despite a growing body of evidence that several other species with whom we share this planet, including whales, dolphins, chimps, baboons, and gorillas, use rich interpersonal communication systems that we don't understand at all.

This hypermedia space is about the hidden complexity that enables our communication. This complexity takes many forms, but generally organizes itself into various systems of communication. There are at least six major types of communication systems, including:

• Communicator Collectives
• Communication Infrastructures
• Languages
• Communication Media
• Generic Media Contexts
• Media Collection Contexts

While this hypermedia space will discuss all of these variants of communication system, it will focus largely on media (hence the name "The Media Space"). As currently imagined, it will be a repository for several kinds of information, including:

• An accounting of the various kinds of communication systems, and how they relate to each other.
• A view of how communications media are invented and reinvented called "Medium as Process".
• A means of usefully comparing media to each other called "media space" (which is, not coincidentally, the origin of this sites name).
• A list of several hundred distinct communication media, starting with a list of about 50 media published with my dissertation.
• A list of well over one hundred characteristics of media with which individual media can be usefully contrasted, starting with the list of 12 characteristics published with my dissertation.
• A chronology of key events in the history of media.
• A detailed view of how a particular instance of one medium, computer conferencing, evolved in a single large organization over the course of fifteen years..

This won't all show up at once or even in a particular order, and I haven't gotten very far yet. Much of the material that will be located here is already written, but must be edited and reorganized into a hypermedia text. There may, moreover, be additions to this list before I've managed to cover everything on the list. While, moreover, I expect to link in all the material eventually, it may not all be located at the same site this page is being posted on. Its part of the magic of networked hypermedia (this medium), that it doesn't really matter where all the pieces are so long as they can be linked into a distributed whole.

I'm putting this material here in part because it might be useful to somebody and in part because I'm interested to read your comments, suggestions, and critiques. For what its worth, I've dreamed of putting together a site like this for years, seriously considered writing my Ph.D. dissertation as a hyperdocument long before HTML was even a development project at CERN, and actually built one of the first hypermedia systems for PC's in the early 1980's.

Last updated on 2/17/97