Consider Your Media
An often overlooked element of the rhetorical situation is medium. Medium (or the plural "media") is the means or way an author uses to present a composition to their audience. This can be through a written essay, a video, an email, or a social media post, to name a few. Medium is directly impacted by your audience and purpose, since the medium you select should be the one that best engages your readers and holds their attention.
In your own experience, how do you see media used to engage with an audience and present a purpose? How does changing media impact the rhetorical situation?
Learn How to be More Creative about the Effective Use of Media
Media can refer to how meaning is conveyed. For example, people speak of television and radio as a kind of media – the mass media. They refer to printed documents distributed by newspapers, magazines, and books as print media. Texts such as databases or multimedia published on the Internet are called online media. The term media is broadly defined, yet two definitions are particularly popular:
- Print media: Paper essays and reports, magazines, books, hypertext
- Mass media: Radio, TV, magazines, newspapers
- Digital media: Works produced and distributed via the Internet
- Spoken media: Talk, speeches
- Visual media: Paintings, clip art, animations, interactive media
- Databases: response forums
- Artistic media: Paintings, sculpture, music, movies
- Video conferencing media: NetMeeting, SeeUSeeMe
New technologies are creating new ways of conveying meaning and blurring distinctions across media. The computer is slowly becoming the printing press, the television, the game console, and the music.
Media Analysis Questions
- Does the text employ multiple media? What is the ratio of visuals to words?
- Would an alternative medium be more appropriate for the text's purpose and audience?
- What additional media could be used to enhance the message?
Source: Joe Moxley, https://writingcommons.org/rhetoric/rhetorical-situation/715-consider-your-media
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.