Metamedium

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A metamedium (plural: metamedia ) is the term used to describe media that draw their content from other media. Such superordinate (“secondary”) metamedia enable or facilitate access to “primary” media. They serve to select, streamline, condense or comment on the content offered by the primary media. The concept of the metedia can be applied to the entire history of the printed and electronic media.

In the literary context, the term has a different, more specific meaning.

term

The term meta-medium, which has not been used uniformly to this day, is implicit in Marshall McLuhan's distinction between “content” and a secondary technical (meta) “medium” that presents the content (e.g. printed newspaper, television receiver). From a data technology perspective, it was first used explicitly in 1977 by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg , who referred to the computer and its user interface as a meta medium. With this meaning, the term was later used for the personal computer , the smartphone and as a designation for all digital platforms on which the content of other media or content generated by media users is bundled and presented.

By Lev Manovich , the concept of Metamediums was further explicated. Manovich used the prefix meta to describe the (sometimes multiple) "layered" processing levels of media content through meta media such as B. Photoshop to denote that extract individual moments of information from the original context and make them changeable. Vilém Flusser uses the term in a metaphorical sense for media that make other media or their contents comparable. The resulting references or the change between different media are also referred to as intermediality .

From a communication- theoretical or system-theoretical point of view , meta- media communication is a meta-communication that selectively refers to "underlying" communication media in the sense of a second-order observation . These include B. Press reviews or the review sections of scientific newspapers in which a selection from press organs or books is discussed. Peter Zhang and Bill Guschwan describe this feature of Metamedien as re- focalization of knowledge contained in the primary media, which in turn progressively focused certain other aspects.

Types of meta media

Technical access media enable or regulate access to primary media, e.g. B. on audiovisual broadcast media . Orientation media include both printed and online television program magazines or telephone directories, but also search engines and instruments for opening up library catalogs or databases . The orientation aid within a media offering that is unclear in its raw state is provided either by a partially editorially monitored coding in content categories, by entering various parameters in search masks or by providing so-called agents who automatically filter the data offer with the help of stored search parameters.

On the one hand, digital orientation media such as Google search are very powerful and have a centralizing effect by drawing attention to content that is also considered relevant by others. These are mostly meta-meta-media, as they tap content from meta-media. On the other hand, they detach the content of the media they have read from their specific media carriers (paper, film) or from their file formats and facilitate their traceability, comparability and other cross-media references. In this way, hypertext can also be viewed as an orientation metedia. Ted Nelson describes the logic of their advance as unstoppable ( inexorable ): “We want to be able to jump from document to document, like a squirrel from branch to branch, passing through one document on the way to another, purchasing just that moment's portion. "

Algorithms and filter bubble formation

The individual user is seldom able to understand the algorithms of digital meta media with the help of which they select and process primary information, let alone develop their own algorithms. He often has to provide his own valuable information in order to receive often redundant (and therefore less valuable, even if useful for him in special cases) information from the meta media. The meta media are becoming more and more informed. In addition, due to their structural assumptions, their semantic models, the construction of their hierarchies or the way they are coded by humans, they are potentially blind or structurally biased towards certain facts. YouTube, for example, repeatedly offers viewers who view a particular video similar videos, which can create filter bubbles . But traditional meta media such as telephone books also show hidden information distortions, for example because many telephone connections are recorded under the names of men.

Metamedialization as a process

The development of metamedia is a response to the increasing complexity of the media and the overabundance of information. According to some authors, the increased incidence of Metamedien (z. B. program guides with in Germany 41 million readers in 2008) is a characteristic feature of the media and information society , with its growing media diversity. Even when the first search engines were set up in 1994/95, they reacted to the problem of the exponential growth of the information available on the web. Metamedia thus represent self-observation mechanisms of the media society. The process of installation and the increase in importance of such metamedia in the course of modernity and especially digital transformation is called “metamedialization”.

In the case of digital meta media, unlike an alphabetically sorted library catalog, for example, the task of collecting and observing is no longer in the foreground: By selecting and recombining content or other media, they generate new content and also generate new user-specific relevance. Digital platforms , hardware and software on which a large number of media can be represented and combined, such as the Internet and the smartphone, are now referred to as "customizable meta media". B. Marketing strategists to overcome traditional target group clustering and segmentation of the market and to serve the segment of one more and more precisely .

Metamedia can not only absorb and distribute the content of other media, but also change it selectively. They allow free combinations and montages and thus also affect the media experience. For both Hegel and Walter Benjamin, art collections, as the forerunners of modern metamedia, offer a framework that brings together what is spatially and temporally separated and, although it robs the works of art presented in this way of their cult value, it increases their enjoyment value. Metamedia thus reinforce the trend towards immediacy by allowing the immediate and simultaneous perception of objects from different spaces and time periods. Israel Márquez emphasizes another psychological function of mobile metamedia, which allow synaesthetic immersion in the media world.

Classical museums and archives often suffer from overcrowding and inadequate development. In so-called Metamedia laboratories, traditional media archives are digitally processed and presented in a user-oriented manner in new contexts, such as the archaeological research results of Stanford University or the audio and video recordings of the Montreux Jazz Digital Project .

Metamedialization in journalism

The process of metamedialization in journalism is also defined as the process of autopoietization or autologization of journalism, i.e. as a process of journalism concentrating on its own journalistic products. In journalistic work, in view of dwindling research capacities, more and more press, radio or film archives have to be used that can only be accessed through meta media (electronic catalogs, search engines, etc.). can be selected and further processed. In this perspective, metamedia are media that accumulate knowledge about other media (according to Stefan Weber), or tools that produce new tools. They bring together what is spatially separated and allow its simultaneous presentation. Metamedia should also help journalists to distinguish scientifically reliable knowledge from irrelevant information and fake news. The private Science Media Center Germany - an interdisciplinary specialist information service - scans specialist journals with the aim of making it easier for registered journalists to check statements with the help of a database.

Legal Aspects

Since meta media monitor other media and tap their content, they raise complicated questions about ownership of the information and liability for the selection, accuracy and disclosure of information. In addition, competition law problems arise . Many critics consider the practice of leading search engines to be detrimental to democracy to adapt their country-specific offers to the regulations in force in these countries in order to avoid legal liability. A study was able to show that the German and French versions of Google, in contrast to Google.com, suppress Nazi content.

Different use of terms in literary studies

In addition to the data-centered definitions, there are other, sometimes significantly different, in literary studies. Here, either metamedialization (analogous to the use of the term with regard to journalism) is understood as a trend towards the concentration of literature on topics internal to the literature - as characterizes many postmodern novels - or “metamediality” as the “superimposition” of the underlying pretext and commentary metatext, whereby the form of the medium can be commented or ironized in the metatext.

The term metamedial is also used for metafictional text and design elements which are intended to clarify the fictionality of a work to the recipient in terms of its “artificiality” or “inventiveness” or to indicate the successful control of the author over his work. This includes compositional and creative means such as font type , size, color, paper, book cover, etc., i.e. the materiality of the carrier medium. Alexander Starre defines metamediality as a form of artistic self-reference that draws attention to the work as an artifact, in which it creates a relationship between the content and the material qualities of the carrier medium and thus a sensory-aesthetic access to the work of art as a unity of content and carrier medium offers. The material properties of the carrier media thus become symbols in a hybrid semiotic structure. Modern comics are good examples of such aesthetic strategies . Therefore, in literary studies it is not always possible to clearly determine what content and meta medium is, since the latter does not always have to be a tangible marginal phenomenon. A hierarchization of the various levels is therefore not possible.

While in the digital world the metamedium enables the original information to be removed from the carrier medium or the information to be extracted from its data format, metamediality in literary studies sometimes describes the tension between the text and its carrier medium or its material properties.

See also

literature

  • Hartmut Winkler: Search Engines: Metamedia on the Internet? In: B. Becker, M. Paetau (Ed.): Virtualisation of the social. The information society between fragmentation and globalization . Frankfurt am Main, New York, 1997
  • Helmut Schanze (Ed.), Susanne Pütz: Metzler Lexicon Media Theory, Media Studies. Approaches, people, basic concepts. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01761-3 .
  • Francisco Campos Freire, Xosé Rúas Araújo, Valentín Alejandro Martínez Fernández, Xosé López García: Media and Metamedia Management. Springer, 2016.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man. New York 1964.
  2. ^ Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg: Personal Dynamic Media , in: Computer 10 (1977) 3, pp. 31-41.
  3. ↑ Hartmut Winkler : Docuverse: Zur Medientheorie der Computer , Regensburg 1997, p. 76.
  4. ^ Israel Marquez: El smartphone como metamedio , on Observatorio (OBS *) 11 (2017) 2, Lisbon.
  5. ↑ Lev Manovich: Software Takes Command. Bloomsbury Academic, New York 2013; ders .: Lev Manovich: Metamediji. Belgrade, Center for Contemporary Arts, 2001; ders: Understanding Meta-media in: ACM SIGGM ​​Views 2004.
  6. ^ Rainer Guldin: The (re) translation game: On Vilém Flusser's multilingual thinking style. In: Rodrigo Antonio de Paiva Duarte, Thomas Friedrich (ed.): Cultural dialogue with Vilém Flusser. Münster 2020, p. 65.
  7. ^ Klaus Bruhn Jensen: How to do things with data: Meta-data, meta-media, and meta-communication. In: First Monday 18 (2013) 10, https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v18i10.4870 .
  8. ^ Peter Zhang: Focal knowledge, medium bias, and metamedium. In: ETC: A Review of General Semantics. July 2014, p. 261 ff.
  9. ^ Klaus Bruhn Jensen: How to do things with data: Meta-data, meta-media, and meta-communication. In: First Monday , 18 (2013), DOI: 10.5210 / fm.v18i10.4870.
  10. ^ Ted Nelson: Above and Beyond Publishing: The Inexorable Logic of Metamedia Publishing. In: P. David Stotts, Richard Furuta, William Jones a. a .: Proceedings of ACM Hypertext'93. Seattle 1993. Xanadu On-Line Publishing, Sausalito, California.
  11. ^ Mathias Rauh: Google, Facebook and Co: The network icons from Vilém Flusser's perspective . epubli, 2014, p. 66 f.
  12. ↑ H. Winkler 1997, p. 186.
  13. ↑ Ulrike Röttger (Ed.): Theories of Public Relations. 2nd edition 2009, foreword, p. 4.
  14. ^ Felix Lenz: After pictorial cultures and before the image explosion of the media: Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Mind' as the apex on the way to modernity. In: Felix Lenz, Christine Schramm (eds.): From the idea to the medium. Munich 2019, p. 37 ff., Here: p. 42.
  15. ↑ Klaus Bruhn Jensen: metamedium on Wiley Online Library October 2016th
  16. ↑ The metamedium Internet: the great challenge , Pierre Werner Institute, European Media Days Luxembourg 2010.
  17. ↑ Veronika Karnowski: Theoretical modeling of the use of mobile media - from the innovation cluster mobile phone to the meta-medium smartphone. In: Holger Schramm, Jörg Matthes, Christian Schemer (eds.): Emotions Meet Cognitions. Springer VS, 2019, pp. 83–91.
  18. ↑ Oliver Dziemba, Eike Wenzel: Marketing 2020. Campus 2009, p. 207.
  19. ↑ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), in: ders .: Works, ed. by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, Frankfurt 1993, Vol. 3, pp. 582-583, and pp. 546-547; see. Felix Lenz 2019, p. 37.
  20. ^ Francisco Campos Freire et al. a., Chapter 3.
  21. ↑ Marquez 2017.
  22. ↑ Metamedia at Stanford , accessed March 11, 2020.
  23. ↑ Metamedia Center of the Technical University of Lausanne , accessed March 11, 2020.
  24. ↑ Stefan Weber: Media - Systems - Networks: Elements of a Theory of Cyber ​​Networks. Bielefeld 2001, p. 101.
  25. ^ Gene Youngblood: Metadesign. The new alliance and the avant-garde. In: Florian Rötzer (Ed.): Digitaler Schein. Electronic Media Aesthetics. Frankfurt / M., Pp. 305–322, here: p. 308.
  26. ^ Website of the SMC
  27. ↑ Florian Rötzer: The world is by no means everything that Google lists. The world's largest search engine 'nationalizes' its results. In: Telepolis, October 25, 2002.
  28. ↑ Jacek Rzeszotnik: Introduction , in: Ders: Writer Autopoiesis: Contributions to literary self-referentiality. Marburg 2011, p. 7.
  29. ↑ Urs Meyer, Roberto Simanowski, Christoph Zeller (Eds.): Transmedialität. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2006, p. 121.
  30. ↑ Alexander Starre : Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture After Digitization. University of Iowa Press, 2015, pp. 28-66, esp. 63 f.
  31. ↑ Christian A. Bachmann: Metamedialität and materiality in comics: Newspaper comic - comic book - comic book. Berlin 2016.