Doc Mara's Media Materiality Manifesto

Change is inevitable, and best handled by many hands, feet, eyes, heads, and hearts.

Because communication mediation is inevitable, we should seek to build transparency, malleability, customizability, and human possibility into each medium.

To do this, media producers/authors/hackers/grokkers must:

1. Build in affordances.
2. Create affordances that offer the fullest range of individual change.
3. Reveal the limitations of the medium.
4. Build in possibilities to exceed limitations.
5. Invite participation through semantic, syntagmatic, paradigmatic, and tropic alignment and misalignment.
5. Identify and isolate cultural values the medium favors.
6. Build in the ability to toggle size, function, and pace of medium input and output.
7. Identify limitations as such.
8. Invite stability through participation instead of building stability as a de facto valuation of particular cultural forms.
9. Offer different levels of contexualization in artifacts.
10. Allow the widest range of juxtaposition possible.
11. Create the possibility, but not inevitability, of repetition.
12. Allow for a range of representations that could include a range of styles.
13. Invite contemplation of embodied consequences of medium use and production.
14. Avoid foreclosure of signification possibilities.
15. Eschew naturalization of inherently social participation.

Distributed changeability in media = Sustainable materiality