Medium Specificity Re-visited

Abstract

Medium specificity arguments have had a long history in film theory. Forged primarily in studies seeking to locate the differences between cinema and theatre,1 or cinema and literature,2 such arguments have a much earlier history in the idea that art forms can be differentiated from one another on the basis of their means of imitation. Medium specificity theories generally concern themselves with the idea that different media have 'essential' and unique characteristics that form the basis of how they can and should be used. Within Film Studies, interest in both the idea of a 'cinematic apparatus' and the formative period of early cinema can be viewed as reactions emerging from a long period of engagement with medium specificity theories. Curiously, while it is common practice to use cinema as an analogy for multimedia, 3 there is little direct discussion of the relevance, or irrelevance, of medium specificity arguments in the broader space of 'new media' theory. 4 Our intent in this article is not to revive medium specificity arguments as these have already been problematised, but rather to establish them as a concern for new media theory, and also to extract from them a concept of specificity that can account for the different characteristics of established and emergent media.