Media
Interesting word, media. Many understand media as newspapers, television and radio, as in news media and broadcast media. If you talk to a computer techy, media are disks and tapes. Telecommunications engineers think ethernet, wireless and broadband. We also have sociologists who understand communication as it works within culture for whom media means books, billboards, photos, email, anything that carries information. (Go figure: they call the content of media texts. Think about the text of a photograph.) I'm also aware of cognitive science folks who see media as extensions of mind, such as tools or our hands. Yes, yes. Point of view is everything.
This brings me to what I refer to when I talk about a medium and media in general. The short answer is: all of the above. This view reflects my personal history in most of the above-mentioned disciplines and interest in the others, and that my current academic explorations draw on all of them, and that I really need to see everything that carries a thought or action outside of the braincase to be understood as a medium so that there is no epistemic boundary to my investigation.
In understanding media, one should think in terms of Media Dimensions that help to expose aspects of their usefulness in various situations.