Design Context: 9. Media Specificity Lecture Notes

The media specificity lecture looked into media/ medium and how the use of that media can be pushed to new ground or how it limits it's purpose.

The use of powerpoint encourages users to create short, brief and incomplete slides.
Humans design products that extend our natural capabilities. Such as glasses, telescopes, hearing aids and inventions that improve smell and touch. Development in technology allows this.
"•Medium specificity is the view that the media associated with a given art form (both its material components and the processes by which they are exploited) entail specific possibilities for and constraints on representation and expression, and this provides a normative framework for what artists working in that art form ought to attempt.
Noël Carroll 2008
An artwork, in order to be successful, needs to adhere to the specific stylistic properties of its own medium.

“Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 1776

Medium/media specificity is a term used in aesthetics and art criticism.

It is most closely associated with modernism, but it predates it. According to Clement Greenberg,, medium specificity holds that "the unique and proper area of competence" for a form of art corresponds with the ability of an artist to manipulate those features that are "unique to the nature" of a particular medium.

Medium specificity and media specific analysis are ways to identify new media art forms, such as Internet art.
•If we are defined by our physical and mental limitations,

by extending these we change the definition of ourselves.
New media and new technology shapes the way we think, communicate and live our lives.