Logic for media. The computational media metaphor

New media as they are established by information and communications technology demand for reconsidering the notion of a medium as a carrier of information and with it the concepts for representation, organization, processing and dissemination of information. We explore a general model for media, the Computational Media Metaphor and utilize Rewriting Logic and Labelled Deductive Systems to model media. We obtain a general description of media according to which the medium can be built as well as a generic media architecture. Our example is the NetAcademy, a computational medium for the scientific community.