Medium Essentialism Fallacy

Medium Essentialism Fallacy
noun

The mistaken belief that certain formats—books over video, radio over television—are inherently more imaginative or intellectually serious than others. The medium essentialism fallacy assumes depth scales with page count or technological austerity, treating a 400-page novel as automatically superior to a four-minute online video, or a golden-age radio drama as more “imaginative” than contemporary television. It sanctifies books by default (the novel, the monograph), nostalgically elevates radio (the era of voices and silence), and dismisses TV and online video as diluted forms—ignoring examples like Severance or Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,” where compression, symbolism, and craft do heavy intellectual lifting. In medium essentialism, imagination is misattributed to format rather than earned through execution.