mediums

Socrates: We must not get the habit of anticipating and suspecting the meaning of one another's words

--Plato's Gorgias

Mediums. It's not a word. Unless you're talking about multiple

energy workers of course.

But despite it being used by some really smart people in some

really intricate contexts and arguments, it still doesn't exist.

The word to describe a medium in the plural, is media.

Why shy away from the word media when trying to describe the

plurality of media (or mediums, if you insist)? It is because the

cultural connotation of media has polluted its dennotation.

'Media' now commonly refers to mass media. 'The Media' is almost

always a reference to mass media, newspapers, television, and film

as if their interests were related.

It is funny that 'media' has become a medium. It is no longer what

it is, but something else. So much so that it is necessary to

abandon the word for the sake of clarity. If you try to talk about

the various conduits we have for communication as media, it gets

muddied, confusion arises about whether the reference was to all

of the vast ways we have of communicating, or just the massively

commodified ones.

New media, social media, mass media, corporate media, multimedia,

mixed media are all starting to bring us back to media instead of

mediums. Since media is a rather broad concept, it has been

prefixed and qualified often. So often that referring to media

alone is ambiguous and could mean any of these things if not

properly refined. But what it really means is mediums, the plural

of a medium.

Medium is no simple word to pluralise though. It has many

different facets and origins. The usage of the word medium to

describe a communications catalyst, when systems of mass

communication were being developed, was an off-shoot of the usage

as a middle or in between. And thus started to describe a separate

entity, not just a middle, but a specific kind of middle that

referred to communications technologies. And so as these

technologies multiplied, so did the new version of medium,

solidifying its identity as distinctly different from the midway

or intermediate in general.

So now we have this word media, that refers to multiple tools of

communication. But it also has come to mean mass media. So in

order to subvert the common usage and return to where a medium

diverted from simply a middle, smart people speaking to a general

audience will say mediums, and I will cringe.

Socrates: When the division of our task is concluded, let us find the point at which we digressed, and return into the old path

--Plato's Republic