Film as a Universal Medium

After Kittler referred to writing as a "universal medium" in a group of readings about film, I had to question what exactly a universal medium is. Writing has the ability to convey any information that can be reduced to letters and digits, but there is so much of human existence that transcends that. Literature and poetry attempt to capture our inner emotional lives, and do so in writing, but writing also relies on creating images in the reader's mind. Film skips the middle steps and communicates the images and scenes and even emotions vicariously through actors. Can all of that really be reducible to something that can be written down? Besides, writing cannot be universally accessible. There are those who are illiterate and languages which no one living understands. Although this must be straying quite a bit from the widely accepted definition of "universal medium" which Kittler almost certainly is using, I feel like a true universal medium should be able to transmit information directly. Without that feature, it might be universal in content, but not in communication. Film, especially once it became coupled with sound recordings, closely mimics the sensory experiences we all live with. Films may be two dimensional and suspended in time, but there is almost no code to translate before what we see on screen becomes something we've practically experienced ourselves. Kittler also uses fiber optic cables as an example of a universal medium. Even more removed from immediate human comprehension, I also realized that films can be transmitted through them, even if they couldn't through writing. Then films must also be reducible to some string of ones and zeros, however unintelligible. It must then be the product of translation I'm stuck on, not the medium itself. The difference, I believe, is that writing takes its final form in something we can understand and translate ourselves, while film and fiber optic cables rely on machines to do some translation for us. So is it the richness of the final product that determines the medium's universality? If so, film must be at least on equal footing with writing when it comes to human experience.