Channel

The route a piece takes to reach someone. Each has its own manners; the same film behaves differently in a cinema, a feed and an inbox.

Each channel imposes manners: the cinema grants darkness and captive attention, the feed grants half a second in bright daylight, the inbox arrives inside someone's obligations. The same film is a different experience in each, because the surrounding contract is different.

Respecting the manners changes the work, not just the crop: sound designed for headphones, first frames designed for silence, pacing designed for the skip button's existence. The discipline is refusing the everywhere export, one file flung at every channel, which treats distribution as done while quietly wasting the work in most places it lands.