Questions of publics and publicness, as the previous two chapters have shown, open up questions of media and mediation. Habermas's (1989) public sphere inextricably links public communication to the practices and institutions of mass media (cf. Garnham, 1992). By contrast, much contemporary debate, both popular and academic, has paid attention to the proliferation of new media technologies and practices that apparently blur long-standing distinctions between the ‘mass’ and the ‘personal’ (Lüders, 2008). Unsurprisingly, these radical changes in media and mediation are seen also to entail radically new configurations of publics and publicness (Holmes, 2002), seen as both positive and negative in political terms. Implicitly buried in such accounts is a narrative about the rise and decline of particular mediums; the replacement of old with new. A favoured example in this respect is newspapers, a medium usually cast as ‘old media’ and seen to relate to particular configurations of mass publicness founded in the 19th century, manifesting in many forms throughout the 20th century, and now finally in relative decline (see, for example, Alterman, 2008; Franklin, 2009). Yet in these and other accounts of the relationships of old and new media, and their implications for publicness or public communication, what is actually implied by ‘medium’ often seems rather opaque.

One of the more notable conceptualisations of ‘medium’ in media theory is that of Marshall McLuhan (1964), made famous by the dictum that the ‘medium is the message’. McLuhan was worried that too much media research fixates on the content of media, when the truly important message of a medium is not its content but the change it brings about in the pattern, scale, pace and scope of human affairs. This priority placed on the materiality of mediums is why so much controversy surrounds McLuhan, who is typically problematised as a technological determinist (though for some, not technologically determinist enough – see Kittler, 1999) with little to say about politics. At least on the surface, his demotion, even refusal, of so-called content may sit uncomfortably with a sense of publicness based around discoursing (see, for example, Warner, 2002). A closer reading of McLuhan, however, reveals that the distinction being drawn between medium and content is merely rhetorical, since: