For my purposes, media is not the plural of medium. Media is integrally plural. It represents a multiplicity and an heterogeneity that cannot be resolved to a determinate set.
As the etymology suggests, media is concerned with the in-between. It suggests a condition that is at once active and passive, associative and disruptive, supplementary and constitutive.
Media is certainly not synonymous with technology. The conventional emphasis on technology – video, photography, computation, etc. – distracts from more fundamental processes of mediation.
Media resists the self-identity of any medium. It undermines conceptions of medium specificity.
Media highlights dimensions of ambivalence, subterfuge and indirection. It suggests the indeterminate relation between being and non-being, communication and estrangement, revelation and veiling.
Media does not take shape as a field, as a species of practice, as a discipline.
Media can sit anywhere and belongs nowhere.
Media cannot allow itself to be media.
Media cannot be itself.