Hello everyone. I'm Robert Craig, professor emeritus at the University of Colorado and co-editor with Klaus Bruhn Jensen of the International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, and I'm delighted to participate in the celebration of Professor Jensen's impressive concurrence of anniversaries by way of this short video.
First of all, I want to offer congratulations to Klaus and also to express my deep gratitude to him for the opportunity to work with him as coeditor through two editions of the Encyclopedia. The pleasure of collaborating with him on those projects is only exceeded by what I have learned from the experience.
My contribution in honor of this occasion takes the form of this short video essay in which I directly address the thematic question: "How many degrees of media can there be?" My answer in a nutshell is that there can be five degrees of media, but the additional degree should be numbered zero instead of five.
I assume everyone at this event is at least somewhat familiar with Jensen's (2022) model of the three degrees of media and an emerging fourth degree. Media for Jensen are material, discursive, and institutional formations that have developed historically from media of the first degree involving communication through human bodies and their extensions in tools such as writing, to media of the second degree in which technologies of analog reproduction take shape as media institutions and practices of one-to-many or mass communication, and to media of the third degree in which digital meta-technologies such as computers and smartphones recombine all previous media and take shape in new institutions and practices of networked many-to-many communication. In the now-emerging fourth degree, media become ubiquitous and pervasive, embedded in natural objects, artifacts, and social infrastructures, for example in body implants, home appliances, and transportation systems, and take shape in new forms of many-to-one communication such as crowdsourcing and surveillance.
As I began to contemplate the question, "How many degrees of media can there be?" the first thought that came to mind was that I should revisit John Peters's book, The Marvelous Clouds (2015), to consider how Peters' concept of elemental media might relate to Jensen's degrees of media.
For Peters, elemental media are aspects of the natural environment, including water, fire, sky, earth, and bodies, that are both meaningful in themselves and compose the material infrastructure that all other media depend on, express, and modify in different ways. As Peters puts it, "the old idea that media are environments can be flipped: environments are also media."
What I would like to suggest is that Peters' elemental media should be included as media of zero degree in Jenson's scheme. Elemental media are media because they are bearers of meaning, and they are media of zero degree because they precede and underlie the progressive development of tools and techniques of communication at the first degree, technologies at the second degree, and meta-technologies at the third degree.
This idea resonates with Jensen's degrees of media in several ways. Jensen and Peters both theorize media as ensembles of the material and the cultural, and both approach media from the perspective of communication. From that perspective it is important to understand that our shared habitat of elemental media constitutes a bedrock source of shared meaning on which all other media depend--so that, as Peters puts it, "Sharing the same time and space with another is already pregnant with meaning before a single word is uttered."
Another interesting connection to explore is the shifting relationship between media technologies and elemental media as technologies and practices develop, and that media of the fourth degree may represent a kind of reconvergence of technology toward the elemental. In this regard, Jensen's description of media of the fourth degree as "media that are embedded in matter, and of matter as media" resonates with Peters's point that environments are also media.
And so, to the thematic question of this event, "How many degrees of media can there be?" I offer the following answer: There can be five degrees of media beginning with the zero degree of elemental media and four degrees of increasingly technologized media that develop on the material basis of those elemental media and, interestingly, at the fourth degree, would seem to re-converge with the elemental media.
I offer these thoughts to Klaus with thanks, congratulations, and best wishes.
And thank you everyone for watching.
References
Peters, J. D. (2015). The marvelous clouds: Toward a philosophy of elemental media. University of Chicago Press.
