After reading across these two texts, I have come away with the definition of medium being how a message is exhibited in a physical sense rather than a content sense. McLuhan simplifies the discussion of medium by stating, "What has been communicated (message) has been less important...than the particular medium through which people communicate," which shows that the way you portray your message is more important than what the content within. By looking at the format of the text, you can gain nearly half of the information based on the way it appears.
To connect medium to other aspects of writing, McLuhan draws upon past examples to connect medium to technological advances. For instance, oral communication in the past, when no other form of communication was available, relied on he ear as the main source of gathering information, while in the printing based world that came much later, visuals and sight were the main source gathering the messages. In our modern era, we can make use of both sources of gathering information through video and animation. The ways that you can exhibit your message and create your medium is through typefaces, type sizes, visual shapes, colors, photographs, drawing, graphs, charts, videos, animations and sound (Wysocki p. 127-137).
Medium and genre seem to coincide to deliver content. The medium in which the message is portrayed creates the genre in which it is categorized. As for audience, you need to know the audience in order to know how to format the text in order to gain the attention of the recipient of the message. By using elements that shape a medium listed in Wysocki's article, one could construct the best medium to accomplish the purpose of the message. Knowledge would be the content found within the medium. Looking back at my draft of project three, I can see how my promo video displays these characteristics such as knowledge being molded into a medium, and the medium heightens the importance of the purpose of my message.
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