The Medium Is The Message And It's Imperfect

15 Oct, 2025

I've been thinking about materials recently, in context of art.

Writing is my preferred medium. Of communication. Of thinking. Of creation. Words are my clay.

Casually browsing a hefty thesaurus was one of my hobbies as a child, which says something.

The Materials and the Medium

With art, and physical mediums, or even digital ones, you can interact with them. In Learning to See: Inside the World's Leading Art and Design Schools, Keith Sawyer talks about how interaction with the materials is what results in great art. You might have an idea of where you want to begin, but ideas aren't the final form. You have to go through the process of iteration and speak to the work. Which - I'm still a little skeptical about, having never thought of writing from this perspective before. It's not like picking up paints and a brush and canvas. Writing with words isn't just creating something for me. I'm also thinking in words all day, every day, too much, some might say. My favorite way to experience emotions is to intellectualize them.

What does this all mean? Why am I feeling this way? What's the cause of this? Would it be better to not feel this way? I'd rather feel something else. Let's go find a way to do that.

So, if it's all in my head and it can also be out on paper, why doesn't it translate 1:1? It's not as if I'm thinking in another language and trying to write it in another. I've tried stream-of-consciousness writing.

It turns out, words don't just make up writing. They're the material, but there's the canvas, the medium that also matters. Writing longhand in my journal is different than writing my notes into Obsidian, and writing a newsletter that's meant to be consumed regularly is different than writing a long essay on a blog somewhere that people might find once and writing a book is different than writing a series of social media posts. Even if all of them had the same exact words, the difference in medium matters.

And when you switch one for the other, it changes the way it's read too.

You can send a chapter in a week in a newsletter. This is meant to read between emails you have to respond to or shopping offers, but you'll always have it in your inbox. You can put it in social media posts or captions or comments. This is meant to be read between a cute picture or another terrible piece of news, but you'll find it easier. Or, you can just put it in a book. This is meant to be something you sit with, and start and stop on your own time, but it's going to take more effort.

And this is just written mediums. There are mediums that go beyond reading to engage other senses. Audiobooks. Podcasts. Text-to-speech. Longer video essays. Short form video. Virtual reality. The futuristic medium that beams meaning directly into your brain.

Switching mediums isn't perfect replication. And all of the mediums have imperfections.

The Process

But it's never really been just about discovering your materials and the medium.

I've read craft books on writing. I've read books and articles about writing online. But after a point, there's only so much reading you can do about writing that doesn't repeat itself. So, I started looking somewhere else other than writers talking about writing. I switched mediums.

I researched art and design and the process of learning visual mediums. A term that kept making its way to me the more I looked this up was process. Trust the process.

There's a process to writing too, but the way it was talked about here was different.

What is this mysterious process that artists keep talking about?

I've envied artists, for creating pieces on a canvas that are just complete. I've also practiced enough to know that even with a painting or a sketch, there can be an impulse to keep adjusting, add another stroke, go over another line, and that can ruin a piece. You have to know when to stop, just like you have to know when you have to stop editing a written piece and just put it out there.

Jonathan Lenthem in Cellophane Bricks (which is a book of art and essays but not a typical art essays book since it's from a primarily fiction writer), talks about this:

Language, and consciousness—that which we seek to stabilize into books—has always been a ghost in the machine. I'm sure I'm not the first writer to to yearn for the seemingly more grounded and absolute situation of a painter or a sculptor, who looks to be an enviable realm of craft, routine, and expertise. Some of this may be a (typically American, Puritan, utilitarian) guilt at the seeming uselessness of accumulations of words on a page, when compared to "making something real".

I read this before I delved into the world of art/design education to apply whatever the fuck artists are doing to my writing. I also design now, so I do see a finished visual product emerge from a blank space, and it does come from spending time looking at other images for reference or inspiration, and actually putting it together and sometimes it works, some times it doesn't. It's problem-solving, having to decide what shapes and colors and typographical hierarchy works to communicate easily. There are deadlines, and a clear goal.

The art/design dichotomy is the creative/technically skilled dichotomy that I feel when I have to describe what I do, the writing for expression/communication dichotomy when I write anything at all, and same contrast even in how I spend my time. Pictured below:

Art is art. Anything can be art. Art doesn't explain itself. But design doesn't just exist for its own sake, it's there for a reason. It serves a function and when it doesn't, it's not good design.

It grates me when there's design that prioritizes form over function, because what's the point of an interesting-looking chair if it's uncomfortable to sit on? Just fence it off and put it on display.

Writing to communicate clearly extends beyond writing copy in the work that I do, it's also in the way I write to others because it's reader-oriented. There's a goal there too. I hate being misunderstood. My technical skills are things I've learned, tools, systems, technology. I also need the money, so the work I do is important.

Writing to express myself, in stories, on a blog post like this, is freer. It's free the way art is free, without any constraints. Being creative just for the sake of who I am. No quality assessment.

Everything in the first column is subjective. The second has hard skills, objective, quantifiable, and everything that helps me navigate the world.

Both of these sides are important, and I want to start thinking of them less like being on opposite sides with friction between the two and as threads that intertwine and intersect and dynamically move in alignment.

Less =><= and more x∞x

So, I'm pulling what I learn about art into writing to communicate, and pulling how I communicate into being creative and writing to express myself better as I design more. And also, learning how to put more of these into paid work.

This is a new discovery for me, put in these terms. You have to practice working with not just the materials, but also the medium. Which is why I've been writing forever, and thinking about these things forever, but putting it in a post is a process that I have to practice more and it's through doing that I can find something new underneath all of this, something that does bring all of this together. That's the process.

And Everything Else

My idea for this post started with writing about writing mediums, why I picked Bear, this tiny corner of the internet, instead of posting on Substack. Or a newsletter. Or Medium. Why isn't this any of those?

Am I allergic to attention? I've thought about this often, but it's really not quite it. I've published written content online, even under my name, that have been read by a lot of people. It's nice to see numbers go up, especially when you're paid for it. There's validation that comes with it, even when that's all the acknowledgement there is sometimes and it feels like this scene from Mad Men.

There's a message of this medium specifically, along with all the other words you read, and the message is: it's on the internet and for real people. Bots might still read this, but if you're here as a human reading this, I've written it for you to read, and you've made it so far, and you reading this was all that was expected on your behalf. You don't have to like, share, comment, subscribe, or do anything at all.

I wanted this to exist in a space where it's just there to be read on its own. You don't have to know who I am, have read anything I've written previously, or have the expectation of publicly liking this under your name, or leave a comment. I wanted to write somewhere where the writing stands alone and you can like it or dislike it and it doesn't matter.

And this medium is still imperfect. It's still not everything that I want to communicate related to this topic, which should go in a book. It doesn't have visuals to make it easier reading for a published essay. It definitely isn't as brief or succinct as it would be for a social media post.

It's still reader-oriented because I want someone to read it, but less so, because the way I write isn't optimized to be found through a search or in service of a black box algorithm that pushes engagement and discovery. It's in the Bear discovery feed, so it's not completely into the void. I might have shared this with you, or someone else did.

It's the blend of expression and communication. Partly up to your interpretation, and partly with something I want to communicate. Partly creative, in the way that it doesn't entirely follow the 'rules' of writing, partly legible enough that it isn't completely incohesive. Partly written as the words come, partly edited, because I still care to give it a shape.

Should I make this better? Continue adding keystrokes to this digital pixel painting? Or maybe just end here because it's long enough and said enough, and the rest should just be putting it out in the world.

I'm learning to trust the process, and work with my materials and my medium, to continue making something imperfect so I can find that elusive something that emerges at the end of this.