Discuss the characteristics of optional and essential media and also specify the process of media utilization.

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If mediators describe the physical agencies which make communication possible, characteristics describe the essential qualities of a medium. These qualities exist, to some extent, independently of either the mediators that constitute the medium, the effects the medium has, or the way people use it. It is reasonable to view characteristics as a high level description of what a medium’s possibilities. They state what can happen when people take advantage of a medium’s potential. Viewed from this perspective, the potential inherent in characteristics sees realization in a medium’s actual effects (a third, still to be examined, view of media).

Restating this view slightly, characteristics express abstract qualities that are inherent to various combinations of physical agencies (mediators). Mediators are concrete and observable. Characteristics are also observable, but are an abstraction related to the way mediators are used. Using biology as a metaphor in which we can express this vocabulary, a discussion of “biological mediators” might say that a bird has wings and a fish has fins. A similar discussion of “biological characteristics” might say that a bird is capable of flying and a fish is capable of swimming. In this view, the difference is one of structure versus behavior. Characteristics are, then, a view of the essential behavior of media. 

In a third perspective of characteristics, they describe the essential relationship of a medium’s mediators (as agency) to agents (the people that use media) and acts (the messages we transmit via media). In this view we see a medium’s mediators as having specific essential impacts on the messages and communicators that a medium mediates:

? A capacitive filter, for instance, will slow the message flow and deliver messages in bundles. The slowed message flow can be regarded as an expression of a characteristic of media. The bundled message flow can be regarded as an expression of a characteristic of media. Both characteristics describe the relationship of a medium to its messages.

? Simultaneous and parallel interfaces between communicators, in another instance, entail both interface symmetry (both communicators have the same interface) and a requirement for synchrony (both communicators must use the medium at the same time). Both synchrony and interface symmetry can be regarded as characteristics of media. Both characteristics describe the relationship of a medium to its users.

Each of these perspectives, characteristics as potential, characteristics as behavior, and characteristics as relationship, contributes to the description of what constitutes a medium’s characteristics. Each perspective is correct. None is entirely complete. One shows how characteristics (as potential) work to create effects (as realization). One shows how mediators (as structure) work to create characteristics (as behavior). The third shows how characteristics express the relationship between mediators and the people and messages which they mediate.

Message Characteristics and Communicator Characteristics
The third view is, perhaps, the richest. It views characteristics as the intersection of medium and agent communicator; of medium and communication act. Characteristics are not, in this view, a simple function of mediator selection. Characteristics instead represent an interaction effect in which mediators have individual and collective effects on both messages and the people that create and receive them. Characteristics can be regarded as behavior or effects in this view, but they are effects and characteristics of clusters of mediators rather than of media per se. This view provides, moreover, in its description of characteristics as expressing the relationship between media and both agents and acts, a useful way of organizing the characteristics of media:

? Media can be said to have message characteristics, including message speed, the distance a message can traverse, the persistence of a message, and the medium’s bandwidth.
? Media can also be said to have communicator characteristics, including audience size, inter activeness, synchrony, ease of use, and interface symmetry.

These characteristics should be regarded as a few obvious selections from a probably infinite variety of media characteristics. Some of the characteristics of media will, like those named above, be easy to observe in a reliable manner. Others will not. It will be relatively easy to operationalize a scale on which the relative speed of media in delivering messages can be compared. It will be extremely difficult to operationalize a set of definitions that classify media as “hot” or “cool” (McLuhan, 1965). It will be relatively easy to state the senses that a medium affects and a summary measure of how many senses are affected. It will be relatively difficult to create a true measure of a medium’s information bandwidth. 

This study views characteristics as a summary statement of a medium’s relationship with its messages and mediators and will repeatedly use this view as a tool for comparing computer conferencing with other media. We will tend to take the easy road, concentrating on a small range of characteristics which are relatively easy to operationalize and reliably observe. The characteristics either:
? make sense as key differentiating characteristics of communication media from the standpoint of existing models of communication.
? are exposed in our study of computer conferencing as key to differentiating computer conferencing from other media.
? are exposed in this chapter, particularly in the discussion of mediators, as key to differentiating media.