Media-specificity

Acknowledgement of the centrality of a text's technical attributes which combine to enact meaning, often associated with materiality
Jennifer Schloske 2026-07-15

Explication

Media specificity refers to the idea that different media possess unique and essential material characteristics that distinguish them from one another and shape how a work is created, engaged with, and understood. The concept of media specificity originates from debates in aesthetics and art criticism, gaining prominence in the work of the formalist art critic Clement Greenberg, although earlier proto-iterations of it exist. Some scholars have criticised media specificity for its potential essentialism and normativity, while others defend it as a valuable methodological approach. N. Katherine Hayles argues for media-specific analysis, stressing the importance of a work’s materiality in the production of its meaning. In the wake of postmedia and transmedia debates, scholars have questioned the value of the term’s application to digital media and have proposed novel analytical approaches.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing establishes a proto-concept of media specificity in his essay, Laocoon (1766), in which he argues that the medium of poetry is essentially temporal and better suited to describe a succession of actions, whereas painting is spatial and better suited to depicting bodies in a single moment (Lessing 91). Clement Greenberg refines this notion in his essay, “Towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940), in which he argues that each medium has a distinct “nature”, determined by its material attributes (297). In his view, an artwork is then successful if it self-reflexively engages with the material limitations of its medium. He names the painters Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet as successful examples, since their works emphasise painting’s essential flatness (302). He asserts that the identity and purity of different art forms come from their media specificity: “It is by virtue of its medium that each art is unique and strictly itself. To restore the identity of an art the opacity of its medium must be emphasized” (305).  

Scholars have criticised Greenberg for perpetuating an essentialist, normative view of media as defined and delineated by their supposedly inherent characteristics (Carroll 9). Art critic Rosalind Krauss takes issue with the essentialist Greenbergian notion of medium specificity without abandoning the concept of the medium altogether (7). She examines the affordances of intermedia art forms like conceptual art, video, and installation to question the purity of art forms and suggests that we “inhabit a post-medium age”, in which art transgresses and questions medium boundaries (20). However, she also defends the theoretical significance of the medium and argues that it “must be a supporting structure, generative of a set of conventions” that are constructed in a “recursive structure” rather than grounded in any inherent essence (26, 27). 

N. Katherine Hayles stresses the importance of media-specific analysis in literary studies. She asserts that “all texts are instantiated and … the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters” (67). Hayles rejects traditional notions of print literature that view it as disembodied, pure thought, and instead asserts that all texts are shaped by their materiality, whether they exist on a page or a computer screen (69). Hayles asserts that media boundaries should be regarded as heuristic and invites playful experimentation and expansion of a form (72, 73). To illustrate the value of media-specific analysis, she examines literary hypertext, which can appear in both digital and print media. She asserts that the reading experience of electronic hypertext necessitates a different type of reading practice in which layers of code remain inaccessible to readers and position them as cyborgs, as these new reading and writing environments “include the computer as an active cognizer” (84). 

Other scholars have questioned the relevance of media specificity and argue that digital media allow works to be experienced independently of their original medium (Harries 171). Lev Manovich posits that since digital media enable transmedia practices, “the traditional strong link between the identity of an art object and its medium becomes broken” (36). He suggests a new “postmedia” aesthetics that focuses on the analysis of software or information interface and the interactive information behaviour of the user (37-39). This shifts the focus from inherent abstract qualities of media to the user’s specific interactive engagement with a work (39). Manovich stresses that this framework can be applied both to current digital media and metaphorically to predigital works (37).

See Also

• Digital Poetry - Employment of computer technology to create, present, or enhance poetic experiences beyond traditional print formats
• Ergodic Literature - Texts that require significant effort from the reader to traverse, often involving non-linear navigation and interaction that contribute to the narrative's meaning
• Hypertext - Type of document comprised of interrelated textual nodes that are connected via associative links, facilitating non-linear traversal and reading
• Materiality - Physical qualities and characteristics of digital media, emphasizing the importance of the medium itself in the creation and interpretation of texts
• Storyspace - Software tool designed for creating and reading hypertext fiction, distinguished by its support of non-linear narrative structures and conditional logic systems called guard fields, which has played a foundational role in the development of electronic literature
• Twitterature - Literature created using the Twitter platform, characterized by brevity, immediacy, and the use of hashtags and links, exploring new forms of storytelling within the constraints of social media

Works Referenced

Carroll, Noël. “Forget the Medium!” Engaging the Moving Image, with a foreword by George Wilson, Yale University Press, 2003. 

Greenberg, Clement. “Towards a Newer Laocoon.” Partisan Review, vol. 7, no. 4, 1940, pp. 296-310. 

Harries, Dan. “Watching the Internet.” The New Media Book, edited by Dan Harries, British Film Institute Publishing, 2002, pp. 171-182. 

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Print is Flat, Code is Deep: The Importance of Media-specific Analysis.” Poetics Today, vol. 25, no. 1, 2004, pp. 67–90. 

Krauss, Rosalind E. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, Thames & Hudson, 1999.  

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon: An Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, With Remarks Illustrative of Various Points in the History of Ancient Art, translated by Ellen Frothingham, Roberts Brothers, 1887 [1766]. 

Manovich, Lev. “Postmedia Aesthetics.” Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities, edited by Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson, University of California Press, 2014, pp. 34-44.

Further Reading

Ackermans, Hannah. “How an Academic Companion Website Makes Media-Specific Arguments.” American Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 4, 2020, pp. 1011–20. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27066969.  

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media, MIT Press, 1999. 

Carroll, Noël. “Medium Specificity.” The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, edited by Noël Carroll, Laura T. Di Summa and Shawn Loht, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 29-47, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_2.  

Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting.” Modern Art and Modernism, Routledge, 1982. 

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” Postmodern Culture, vol. 10, no. 2, 2000. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2000.0011  

---. “The Time of Digital Poetry: From Object to Event.” New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, edited by Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss. MIT Press, 2006, pp. 181–206. 

---. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, University of Chicago Press, 2012.  https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226321370.001.0001. 

Kinder, Marsha. “Medium Specificity and Productive Precursors: An Introduction.” The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities, edited by Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson, University of California Press, 2014, pp. 3-19. 

Krauss, Rosalind E. “Reinventing the Medium.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 25, no. 2, 1999, pp. 289–305. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344204. Accessed 12 Dec 2026. 

---. “Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition.” October, vol. 116, 2006, pp. 55–62. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40368424. Accessed 12 Dec. 2026. 

Petrová, Zuzana. “Medium-specific Aspects of Digital Reading and their Impact on Reading Comprehension.” Human Affairs, vol. 32, no. 2, 2022, pp. 134-144. https://doi.org/10.1515/humaff-2022-0011.

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