Towards a Mediological Method: A Framework for Critically Engaging Dimensions of a Medium

This article explores the potentials of a mediological method for informing our and student's work as consumers and producers of diverse media. Mediology, an interdisciplinary approach developed by theorist Régis Debray, can help us account for both the conceptual and material aspects of media at both the macro levels of cultural structures and the micro levels of practice. Its emphasis on intersections between praxis and ideology can inform critical analysis of media artifacts and discourses as well as authorial decisions about media composition. Inspired by this approach, I offer a framework for analyzing media that includes seven dimensions—technological, social, economic, archival, aesthetic, subjective, and epistemological—which are particularly relevant to media's functions as cultural formations and sites of rhetorical praxis. This framework seeks to summarize general considerations related to each dimension and make connections among some of the key issues being raised by current scholarship on digital composing. I conclude with suggestions for how this framework could be applied within composition pedagogies. I suggest how the framework can help students complicate deterministic, essentializing assumptions about media and adopt critical approaches to how media function.