Blogging and the emerging media ecosystem - "'Media' is the plural of 'medium', a word with an interesting etymology. The conventional, everyday interpretation holds that a medium is a carrier of something. But in science, the word has another, more interesting, connotation. To a biologist, for example, a medium is a mixture of nutrients needed for cell growth. And that's a very interesting interpretation for our purposes. In biology, media are used to grow tissue cultures - living organisms. The most famous example,I guess, is the mould growing in Alexander Fleming’s Petri dishes which eventually led to the discovery of penicillin. WhatI want to do is apply that perspective to human society: to treat it as an organism which depends on a media environment forthe nutrients it needs to survive and develop. Any change in the environment - in the media which support social and cultural life - will have corresponding effects on the organism. Some things will wither; others may grow; new, mutant, organisms may appear. The key point of the analogy is simple: change the medium, and you change the organism. This way of looking at our media environment is not new. I picked it up originally from the late Neil Postman, a passionate humanist who taught at New York University for more than forty years and was an unremitting sceptic about the impact of technology on society. In a series of witty and thought-provoking books -Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Amusing Ourselves to Death, The Disappearance of Childhood and Technopoly- he described how our societies are shaped by their prevailing modes of communication, and fretted about the consequences. Postman deserves to be better known. But he was his own worst enemy, because he was a witty and iconoclastic writer who apparently did not realise that, in academic life, you will never be taken seriously if you make jokes or write clearly. In the academic culture, luxuriant obscurantism is taken as the litmus-test for profundity.The other reason Postman may have been under-rated is that he was a sucker for the Big Idea, the broad sweep across historical periods and disciplinary specialisms. He was therefore regarded with suspicion by scholars whose preferred modus operandi is to crawl along the frontiers of knowledge peering through a thick magnifying glass."

https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/discussion/blogging.pdf