Williams does not provide a true media typology because the features he identifies can overlap. He rather identifies some possible features of communications systems. A computer network for example is not primarily based on the human body. It can potentially multiply and thereby amplify the attention given to voices, texts, images, videos, etc. It is also a storage medium that stores content as digital data that is transmittable at high speed. It provides textual, visual and audio-visual alternatives to human activity: it can, for example, record, store and transmit a short story that a storyteller invented so that s/he only needs to tell the story once and not repeatedly in order for it to become available to a wider public.
Communication requires media for the encoding, difusion and decoding of information (production, distribution, consumption). Media in each of these steps can be technologised and/or based on nature and human capacities. Production, distribution and consumption of information can be based on pure human activities or be technologically mediated. The networked computer is a medium, in which the production, distribution and consumption of information converge. Digitisation makes the computer a universal machine for universal communication. In computer-mediated communication, the production, distribution and consumption of information are all three based on technology. Consumption can at the same time be production of information. Digital communication is, however, not simply technological, but based on human activities, i.e. writing, typing, human speech and bodies that are recorded in audiovisual digital formats (digital images, digital videos, etc.). So we here have an example of how the media of the human body, the human mind and computer technology work together. Social systems are organised in space and time. Not all of them are based on face-to-face communication, in which humans are in the same place at the same time. Communication can be mediated and stretched in time and over space. If such a stretching takes place, then communication is either spatially (synchronous communication with spatial distance) or temporally (asynchronous communication without spatial distance) or spatio-temporally distanced (asynchronous communication with spatial distance). All technological and symbolically generalised media spatio-temporally distanciate communication, but are at the same time grounded in and dialectically mediated with the media of the human body and the human mind.
Beyond Habermas: Rethinking Critical Theories of Communication
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