06-downing.qxd 6/29/2004 8:09 PM Page 123 6 TECHNOLOGY

T media in media studies are the technologies that mediate between those who make messages and those who receive them. Models of the communication process have long included the media, but for many years, research almost exclusively focused on message production and reception, with little attention to how messages got from here to there. The convergence of technologies that has resulted in the internet, however, has provoked a great deal of interest in just what makes one technology different from another. Today’s global information infrastructure is a “pan-medium” (Theall, 1999) that combines all previous media, but differences among them still matter: Media developed earlier remain in use, many forms of communication use electronic and nonelectronic media in combination, and although technologies may have multiple meanings, and uses they are not infinitely malleable; materialities still matter. The ways we use media and the policies we make for them are, in the end, always local and therefore technology specific. This chapter opens by distinguishing among different classes of technologies and between stand-alone technologies and technological systems, looks at characteristics of technologies that make certain choices more or less appropriate in particular circumstances, examines how new technologies appear and come into use, reviews the technological features of the contemporary global information infrastructure that provides the context and conduit for the media, and concludes by looking at media themselves as technologies. 6