nonmedia

Nonmedia is a term used in some humanities and social sciences to describe phenomena, activities, or artifacts that are not produced, distributed, or consumed through recognized media channels such as newspapers, radio, television, film, or digital platforms. The concept emphasizes experiences and materials that occur outside mediated communication and mass distribution, focusing on immediacy, materiality, and direct social interaction.

Nonmedia contexts include face-to-face conversations, hands-on crafts, public spaces, performative actions in real time, and physical objects or environments that do not depend on media distribution. It also covers experiences that are not digitally documented or broadcast, such as certain forms of experiential art, in-person education, and tactile objects that people encounter without media mediation.

In scholarly discourse, nonmedia is used to analyze what is lost or altered when media mediation is removed; it intersects with material culture, phenomenology, and ethnography. It can illuminate embodiment, space, and the affect of environments. The term is not widely standardized, and its boundaries are debated; critics warn it can become a vague catch-all category that lacks precise delimitation between what counts as media and what does not.

See also: media; nonmedia art; material culture; phenomenology.