To mediate is to convey or to link, to act as a medium for something, or between two things. The word “media” is a pluralization of the word medium. For this class, when we say “media” we do not mean to reference the entity we allow to stand as some ubiquitous progenitor of information and entertainment in society—as we would in statement like. “The media is lying to us.” or “ The media is inciting panic.” Instead we mean to study the history of “mediums,” or the conveyances and linkages between people in the modern world. But, in this, precisely what IS mediated?

Propinquity is kinship, togetherness. And if we think of society in its most simplistic sense, as people together, then mediated propinquity is the conveyance of society.

I think it is pretty safe to say that people are not together, if they cannot somehow sense the togetherness. One is together with another if, and only if, that one can see, hear, touch, taste, or smell that other and visa versa. If not, there is no society. Media convey sensory connections.

So, the history of media we are studying is a history of the mediated propinquity we call human society.

The media that convey togetherness can be naturally occurring, as are the vocal chords that vibrate to create the sound of a human voice, the air that carries those sound waves, or the eardrum that receives those waves. Media can also take the form of some technological facilitation of these natural, ambient media, including the microphone that picks up the sound waves carried by the air, the computer receiver that translates the analog signal of the voice into a binary code, the wires or wavelengths that transport the code, another computer receiver that retranslates the code back into analog signal, or the speaker that amplifies the signal as sound waves so that they may be finally carried by the air to a waiting ear. Media can be any among of these individual facilitations, or we can amalgamate and compartmentalize our conception of the technology and speak in terms of the whole of a telephone system as one medium that allows for the exercise of society over great distances.

As you get further into Briggs and Burke, the authors will shift seamlessly from a discussion of communications media into an engagement with transportation media. As you read this I want you to see beneath the surface of this possibly confusing juxtaposition to see transportation and communication as serving the same purpose. If you ask yourself what is being communicated when one sends a telegraph message, and if you ask yourself what is being transported when a train carries a person or a package across the country, I hope that you will be able to see that the answer is always the same. Each of these, as do all transportation or communication media, represents a technological facilitation of the exercise of society. Each of these effects a mediated propinquity.

So, essentially what we study here is the history of modern technological facilitations of the mediation of society within the context of the society that employs these facilitations for its own mediation—from speaking and writing, to print, through broadcast and mechanized transportation, and into the computer age and the World Wide Web. What we look for in the reading, and seek to represent in Tweet and tumblr, is the human agency (the choices, actions, arguments, and beliefs of people) that helped to drive and steer that development (how the technology evolved, the use to which it was put)—in other words, the agency that drove change over time, with regard to mediated propinquity.