As Joshua Meyrowitz explains in “Medium Theory,” medium theory “focuses on the particular characteristics of each individual medium . . . .” And the task of the medium theorist is to ask “what are the relatively fixed features of each means of communicating and how do these features make the medium physically, psychologically, and socially different from other media and face-to-face interaction?” (50).
In Rethinking Media Theory, Armand and Michele Mattelart argue that media studies should not forget history and must focus on questions related to “the genealogy of media systems,” how media “are linked to their historical and geographical areas,” “the economic and political determinants of the social functions and uses of communications technologies,” and the role that the “realm of the imaginary” plays in those uses (23). N. Katherine Hayles’s work provides an excellent foundation for positioning C-MOC in the conversation on the electronic mediation of texts and the ways in which oral composition challenges many printcentric notions of the materiality of writing. “Whether in print or on screen,” writes Hayles in “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “the specificity of the medium comes into play as its characteristics are flaunted, suppressed, subverted, reimagined” (87).
