Media (communication)

In communication, media (sing. medium) are the outlets or tools used to store and deliver semantic information or contained subject matter, described as content. The term generally refers to components of the mass media communications industry, such as print media (publishing), news media, photography, cinema, broadcasting (radio and television), digital media, and advertising. Each of these different channels requires a specific, thus media-adequate approach, to a successful transmission of content. The development of early writing and paper enabling longer-distance communication systems such as mail, including in the Persian Empire (Chapar Khaneh and Angarium) and Roman Empire, can be interpreted as early forms of media. Writers such as Howard Rheingold have framed early forms of human communication, such as the Lascaux cave paintings and early writing, as early forms of media. Another framing of the history of media starts with the Chauvet Cave paintings and continues with other ways to carry human communication beyond the short range of voice: smoke signals, trail markers, and sculpture. In its modern application, the term media is relating to communication channels was first used by Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, who stated in Counterblast (1954): "The media are not toys; they should not be in the hands of Mother Goose and Peter Pan executives. They can be entrusted only to new artists because they are art forms." By the mid-1960s, the term had spread to general use in North America and the United Kingdom. According to H. L. Mencken, the phrase mass media was used as early as 1923 in the United States. The term medium (the singular form of media) is defined as "one of the means or channels of general communication, information, or entertainment in society, as newspapers, radio, or television."