Materiality

Often associated with Marxist thought, the term refers to the economic factors that affect human behaviors, attitudes, and achievements. Theorists who adhere to the ideology of materiality posit that a person's economic situation—income, property, earning power, relationship to the means of production, and the like—is more important than ideas in guiding his or her behavior. This notion is contrasted with idealism or “liberal idealism,” which holds that ideas are the most important factors. In the context of media and communication scholarship, the general connotation of the word—concrete as opposed to ethereal—is also at play. The notion of material as concrete aligns with those economic elements that are considered static or irreducible.

The term is also used in a related context to describe the characteristics of the media. The communications theorist Marshall McLuhan described the media as one of the many “extensions of man,” which also included other nonphysical or unfixed material. In his view—and many other scholars adhere to it—the media are a paradigm defined by the relationship between form and content. McLuhan's belief that “the medium is the message” implied that the ethereal component of the media has important content that has the ability to affect human behavior and society. Therefore, the materiality, the physical nature and dimension of the medium, is as important as or even more important than the content being delivered by the medium. Both the immateriality and the materiality of media objects and systems can be addressed. For further reading, see Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer (1994), McLuhan (1964), and Williams (1977).