How to Prepare a Media Noodle

Part of the workload of media educators, I believe, is to draw ideas from critical and cultural theory in communication, film, literature, sociolinguistics and other fields to refresh models, paradigms and perspectives that inspire classroom practice. I have spent a good part of the last two years rewriting Media Literacies: A Critical Introduction (2012) with my colleagues and friends, Stuart R. Poyntz and Nicole K. Stewart. Both situated in Communications programs, Stuart and Nicole share a great number of common references and touchstones. As an Education scholar, I am caught sometimes on the outside looking in when we are workshopping text together, as was the case when I confronted my learning curve on the concept of mediatization. It turns out I was still stuck on mediation. In brief, mediatization is that process whereby communication and media fundamentally change individuals and societies whereas mediation references the act of meaning making as a two-way process between media screens and audiences. Deep mediatization is an advanced stage of mediatization in which all elements of our social world are deeply related to media and their infrastructures.

My need to rethink media theory and paradigms sent me seeking a visual model to help frame ideas and develop heuristics. Confronted with Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp’s The Mediated Construction of Reality (2017), I was struck by what they called the media manifold:

We use the term ‘media manifold’ to capture the many-layered complexity of our uses of media in the digital era… [I]t refers to the many-sided and interdependent availability of different technological communication media from which individuals select their specific media ensembles.

In essence, media use involves making specific selections from what can be an infinite variety of technologies, platforms, modalities, genres and human motives. I took the media manifold as an opportunity to slow down the chaos and speed of contemporary media life into discrete synchronic snapshots – basically workable chunks – that could inform both media studies and classroom practice. Couldry and Hepp describe a reverse scaffold where media users can draw upon the whole media ensemble (all of the options, techniques and affordances of media – what I could do), a partial media repertoire (those options an individual has come to adopt and adapt – what I can do) and, in a given moment, a selection of a tool/platform, a modality/genre, and a motivation of some sort (what I want/need to do).

As luck would have it, I was visiting family and someone suggested we stop for lunch at the Noodlebox, a fast-food pan-Asian noodle house. The way you select a meal at the Noodlebox is to choose a theme (Kung Pao, Teriyaki, Pad Thai, or etc.); then a protein (chicken, tofu, etc.); next a degree of spiciness; then a type of noodle; and, finally, the option of extras. This menu provided the ‘aha moment’ that answered the media manifold question for me. From this, I devised what I first called the Media Menu but have renamed the Media Repertoire. Here is a short sampler list:

1. The Commuter’s Scroll

2. The Community Organizer’s Toolkit

3. The Media Masher

4. The Classroom Collaborator

I describe the noodle in detail in a forthcoming article in the Canadian Journal of Communication (Hoechsmann, 2026). Here, I just make a few observations: first, the Media Noodle is designed as a Mobius model where all of the three spaces exist on one continuous line and morph into one another (Levy, 1998); second, given the dynamic and persistent ways in which the virtual world orchestrates our actions IRL (in real life), we place Actions into the middle alongside Meanings; third, ecosystem draws upon critical political economy, media ecologies from McLuhan to the present, and ecomedia literacy; fourth, inspired by sociolinguistics, multiliteracies, and New Literacies, multimodality allows space for both modalities and genres; and, fifth, motives draws together a remix of rhetoric, participatory cultures, and ongoing work in audience studies.

So far, cooking this noodle has led to interesting discussions, not always favorable, but generally spirited and curious. When a noodle sits on a shelf it remains dry and brittle, but once it is thrown in the pot, it loosens and becomes elastic. In the month of June, 2026, the Media Noodle will travel to Rome and to Mexico where IMLRS and Alfamed audiences will have an opportunity to toss it into the cauldron and stir. I have no doubt that both the noodle and I will be enriched by the experience! 

Grazie! Gracias! Thank you!

Couldry, N., & Hepp, A. (2017). The mediated construction of reality. Polity Press.

Hoechsmann, M. (2026). The Media Noodle and Mediatization: Rethinking Media Education Models. Canadian Journal of Communication (forthcoming).

Hoechsmann, M., & Poyntz, S. R. (2012). Media literacies : A critical introduction. Wiley-Blackwell.
Lévy, P. (1998). Becoming virtual : Reality in the digital age. Plenum Trade.