It is one medium, two media. It is one of those Latin words that do not follow the sensible rules of English. That is why no one ever says “medias” or, when speaking about the news, “the mediums”.
When people say “the media” in most cases they mean what used to be called “the press” – news reporters as a whole. But because the printing press is no longer the only medium through which news is reported, they are now called “the media” instead. That only happened in the last fifty years or so.
McLuhan uses the word in its most general sense: any means through which people become informed, such as newspapers, books, television, magazines, radio, the Internet and so on. For McLuhan it was impossible to understand man or history unless you knew how he was affected by the various media, how they extended him and changed his sense of himself and his place in the world.
Most use the word in a narrower sense than McLuhan to include only those media that are both public and reach large numbers of people at once. That means things like telephone calls, letter writing, IM, spam, company newsletters and schools are not media. But it does include things like films even though they are no longer used to carry the news: because they are public and reach large numbers.
The Internet, because it is still so new, does not always regard itself as part of the media but, like it or not, it is. Just as CNN. Or Drudge. New media are being invented all the time – there is no sign of that slowing down yet.
See also: MIT’s Media Lab
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