Mediatic Etymology

When establishing a cohesive framework within which to understand media, Marshall McLuhan famously posited that the content of every medium is yet another medium, and the method of "Mediatic Etymology" offers a speculative tool which builds upon McLuhan's notion of remediation and offers a speculative tool with which one might theorize the existence of dead media whose origins remain unknown.

In contrast to the media archaeology practices pioneered by Friedrich Kittler and others, mediatic etymology does not begin with an extinct material artifact whose originas might illuminate informatic paradigms excluded from the present moment. It rather begins with the content of a living medium, seeking to locate the medium from which they descend in an attempt to admit the informatic possiblity of the present.

, but rather with the content of a living medium. One might

 Whereas material artifacts ask us to construct a modality that no longer exists  with content in a living medium which offers no mediatic precedent for its appearance in mediated form.  Content which exhibits this phenomenon can easily be found throughout the graphic user interfaces of computer operating systems which seek to mimic funcitonal objects and activities which 

 He explained that the content of film was the screenplay or novel, that the content of printed matter was the alphabet, and that the content of the alphabet was phonetic speech.  The process of remediation is invaluable to the media archaeological project because it allows older forms of