For other meanings of "medium," see Medium (disambiguation). The word medium has a number of uses: The most common meaning of the word medium is an average or mean in a range of sizes or conditions. ...

A medium (plural media) is a carrier of something. Common things carried by media include information, art, or physical objects. A medium may provide transmission or storage of information or both. Information is a term with many meanings depending on context, but is as a rule closely related to such concepts as meaning, knowledge, instruction, communication, representation, and mental stimulus. ...

By metonymy, the industries which produce news and entertainment content for the mass media are often called "the media" (in much the same way the newspaper industry is called "the press"). In the late 20th century it became commonplace for this usage to be construed as singular ("The media is...") rather than as the traditional plural. In rhetoric and cognitive linguistics, metonymy (in Greek meta = after/later and onoma = name) is the use of a single characteristic to identify a more complex entity. ... Press is a general term having a number of related meanings stemming from the original definition of pressing as the physical action of applying force: Things relating to Metalworking: Machine press, a machine that shapes material by the application of pressure; Flypress, a machine that cuts material by pressing with... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999 in the...

Types of media

A medium is characterized by what it carries, as follows:

Information media

• Speech, gestures, telephone.
• Stone scores, audio and video recordings, hard disks
• Paper, letter mail
• Mass media: recitations, newspaper, magazine, movies, broadcast media (television, radio, streaming media), Compact discs, DVDs, videocassettes
• Interactive media: computer games, online games, video games, edutainment, interactive television
• The Internet is a mix of mass media and personal media

Speech: (n. ... A telephone handset A touch-tone telephone dial Telephone This article is about telephone technology. ... Typical hard drives of the mid-1990s. ... Mass media is the term used to denote, as a class, that section of the media specifically conceived and designed to reach a very large audience (typically at least as large as the whole population of a nation state). ... A collection of magazines A magazine is a periodical publication containing a variety of articles on various subjects. ... Film refers to the celluloid media on which movies are printed Film is a term that encompasses motion pictures as individual projects, as well as the field in general. ... Streaming media is media that is consumed (read, heard, viewed) while it is being delivered. ... Size of CD compared to pencil. ... DVD is an optical disc storage media format that can be used for storing data, including movies with high video and sound quality. ... The videocassette recorder (or VCR, less popularly video tape recorder) is a type of video tape recorder that uses removable cassettes containing magnetic tape to record audio and video from a television broadcast so it can be played back later. ... New media usually refers to a group of relatively recent mass media based on new information technology. ... A computer game is a game composed of a computer-controlled virtual universe that players interact with in order to achieve a defined goal or set of goals. ... Internet games (also known as online games) are games that are played online via the Internet. ... A computer game is a game composed of a computer-controlled virtual universe that players interact with in order to achieve a defined goal or set of goals. ... Edutainment is a recently coined term, a portmanteau, that expresses the union between education and entertainment in a television program, game or website. ... Interactive television describes any number of efforts to allow viewers to interact with television content as they view. ...

Regional media

• Belarus
• Poland
• United States

Art media

• In art, the medium is the material in which an artist works (ie paint, wood, marble, steel, etc).

Cross media

Cross-media means the idea of distributing the same message through different media channels. Many authors understand cross-media publishing to be the ability to publish in both print and on the web without manual conversion effort. Because recipients have differently and have different needs, the conversion cannot be automated with the electronic means available today. An increasing number of wireless devices with mutually incompatible data and screen formats make it even more difficult to achieve the objective “create once, publish many”. Printing is an industrial process for reproducing copies of texts and images, typically with ink on paper using a printing press. ... Web can refer to: Spider web: A mesh built by a spider, composed of spider silk and usually used for catching prey. ... Wireless is an old-fashioned term for a radio receiver, referring to its use as a wireless telegraph. ...

Physical object media

In biology and chemistry, a solvent serves as a medium for molecules.

A medium through which waves propagate may be classified as follows:

• Linear medium, if different waves at any particular point in the medium can be added;
• Bounded medium, if it is finite in extent, otherwise unbounded medium;
• Uniform medium, if its physical properties are unchanged at different points;
• Isotropic medium, if its physical properties are the same in different directions.

Quotations

Marshall McLuhan was famous for saying "The medium is the message." Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, scholar, academic, professor of English literature, communications theorist and one of the founders of the study of media ecology. ... The word medium has a number of uses: The most common meaning of the word medium is an average or mean in a range of sizes or conditions. ... Message in its most general meaning is the object of communication. ...

See also

• Abandonware
• Blank media tax
• Communication
• Interactive media
• Internet forum
• Mass media
• Media bias
• Media controversy
• Media studies
• Multimedia
• News media
• Political media