Communication, the conveyance of messages, is the purpose of the media according to the self-professed ethics of the mass communicators. Messages and their communication imply otherness: they are about something other thanmessages and communication, something in some other place and time, addressed to others by a self. Nevertheless, despite their dimensions of otherness, messages, communication, and the media have always been about themselves, too – self-referential messages about messages, communication about communication, media about the media. Street criers who once called out their public announcements did not only attract the audience’s attention to their messages but also captured their imagination by means of their voices, rhetoric, gestures, and appearance. The.
