In my view, we can understood "person-to-person communication channel" identity as a subset of "media distribution channel" identity. For what is being sent over email or posted to a newsgroup is simply another form of media – one's thoughts formatted as text, i.e. human language. If this perspective may appear strange, it is only because during the history of modern media, from photography to video, a media object was usually (1) created by special type of professional users (artists, designers, filmmakers); (2) mass reproduced; (3) distributed to many individuals via mass printing, broadcasting, etc. The Internet returns us to the age of private media – the eighteenth century literary salons and similar small intellectual communities where the messages traveled from an individual to another individual or to a small group, rather than being distributed to millions at once.

Thus the computer is a new type of media distribution machine which combines public and private media distribution.

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– Lev Manovich
(f rom "Avant-Garde as Software")