Every message is shaped by the mechanics of media. Whether it’s a tweet, a TikTok video, a news article, or a movie, the characteristics of the medium determine how it’s made, how it’s consumed, and whether it spreads. If you understand the mechanics of media, you can more effectively communicate in a wide variety of mediums, and protect yourself from being manipulated by media.    The message is the mechanics of media  As media theorist Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.” In  Understanding Media, he wrote:   The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium...results from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs....   In other words, it’s not the content of the medium we should be worried about, but the way the characteristics of that medium determine its content – the mechanics of media.  The five characteristics of media  I propose that there are five characteristics present in any medium, which determine these mechanics. These characteristics affect the creation, consumption, and distribution of media. (In other words, what message is delivered, how that message is received, and whether or not that message spreads.)  Those five characteristics are:   Incentive Sensory Physical Social Psychological   The mechanics of media are so complex, these characteristics naturally interact with one another. I’ll give a brief introduction of each, then show how these characteristics work in the popular mediums of podcasts, Twitter, and TikTok.  1. Incentive  The Incentive characteristics of a medium are sources of motivation, whether money or otherwise, that shape the creation, consumption, and distribution of messages in that medium.  The creator of a piece of media is motivated by various incentives, such as money and relationships. Whether or not someone is able to consume a piece of media depends upon whether its affordable or otherwise accessible. Whether or not a piece of media spreads depends upon whether incentives are aligned for the distribution platform to allow it to spread.  So, a journalist may be motivated to write a story that gets page views, because that’s how they’re paid. That’s how they’re paid, because the newspaper doesn’t have paying subscribers and thus relies upon ad revenue. The stories with click-bait headlines spread and get more page views because they increase engagement for the social media platform they’re shared on, which increases the social media platform’s ad revenue.  2. Sensory  The Sensory characteristics of a medium are the ways in which the medium engages senses such as sight, hearing, and touch. Marshall McLuhan wrote about how so-called “sense ratios” were engaged by a medium. Sensory characteristics primarily affect the consumption of the medium, but those effects overlap with creation and distribution.  Written content, for example, can be absorbed at a reader’s own pace. As Neil Postman pointed

300. The Mechanics of Media

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