Substrate, Platform, Interface, Format

The rise of digital technologies in the 1980s led to the development of new formalist frameworks, as scholars tried to identify what distinguished so-called “new media” from all that came before it. Tracing this history across textual and media studies, I show how this formalism catalyzed the desire for more comparative histories of media even as it increased misunderstandings across fields. I then introduce and define four words that cut across textual and media studies:substrate, platform, interface, and format. Together, these terms offer a shared, cross-disciplinary schema for describing the media technologies that store, transmit, and process human culture.