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

Melinda Turnley's article argues that mediological methods should be broken down into seven dimensions in order for students, teachers, and researchers to be able to fully understand the media that are being studied. Convergence has merged traditional media with digital technology to create today's media. Turnley explains that media today are multimodal, making it much more complex to analyze them than it was in the past. Current media include a variety of components--digital text, images, audio, video, etc. By creating seven dimensions as a standard framework for analysing media--technological, social, economic, archival, aesthetic, subjective, and epistemological--students, teachers, and researchers can take a medium's intricate design and break it down into a more easily understandable meaning.

Here is a brief description of each of the seven dimensions:

Technological: Practical elements that are essential for functioning the medium
Social: Metaphors, pictures, and narratives that are related to the medium
Economic: The medium is developed, distributed, and maintained through support from the production resources
Archival: Material components that are collected to document and preserve the medium
Aesthetic: The creation, formatting and design of content that is associated with the medium
Subjective: Assumptions and construction embedded within the format and design of a medium
Epistemological: A medium's assumption to conceive about knowledge, information, truth, intelligence, and literacy

Turnley's goal for creating these dimensions is to provide a quick reference guide when analysing media. She has developed a framework based upon mediological methods that is flexible and accessible. These dimensions can be applied to both old media formats like newspapers and new media formats like blogging.

Turnley has demonstrated these dimensions in some of her classes. Students used these seven dimensions to come up with critical connections with their research. One student focused her project on blogs. She used the archival dimension for analyses as well as the social and subjective dimensions.

Turnley hopes that the creation of these seven dimension will help create a reflective path that will contribute to the field's continued examination into the perspective of new media writing.