Perhaps the most critical shift came with spiritualism, around 1850, when a person, typically a woman imitating the telegraph’s ability to bridge wide chasms, came to be called a medium, which no longer meant a natural element but a human intermediary between the worlds of the living and of the dead. A spiritualist medium was not an environment enveloping organisms but a person communi- cating meanings that were distinctly human—that is, located in minds (whether incarnate or not). This was a stepping-stone to the sense prevailing in the twentieth century that media were human-made channels that carried news, entertainment, advertising and other so-called content. The spiritualist quest for communiqués from distant minds went together with the shrinkage of the notion of communication to mean intentional sendings among humans.