Media Transformation

The Transfer of Media Characteristics among Media

L. Elleström

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137474254
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

This is a methodical study of the material and mental limits and possibilities of transferring information and media traits among dissimilar media. Elleström proposes a model for pinpointing the most vital conceptual entities and stages in intermedial transfers involving different media types such as speech, writing, music, films, and websites.

1

Introduction

Abstract: In the introductory chapter, I argue that basic research in the area of media transformation – the transfer of media characteristics among media – is vital for further progress in understanding communication in general. I describe the aim of the study as twofold: first, to fuse a number of study areas that have been unduly separated into one overarching field of media transformation research and, second, to form a conceptual model that facilitates a analysis of transfers of media characteristics. The ultimate goal is a theoretical framework that provides a thorough explanation of what happens when cognitive import is changed or corrupted during transfers among different types of media. This chapter also includes a critical discussion of previous attempts to map the field of media interrelations.

Keywords: intermediality; transmediality; media transformation; multimodality

Elleström Lars. Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137474254.0004.

All human beings use media, from gestures and speech to newspapers and computers, and the collaboration of all these media is essential for living, learning, and sharing experiences. Understanding mediality is the key to understanding how meaning, or cognitive import, is created in human interaction, whether directly through the capacities of our bodies (what I call our internal technical media) or with the aid of traditional or modern external technical media.

In the broadest sense of the word, media may be understood as communicative tools constituted by related features. All media are multimodal and intermedial in the sense that they are composed of multiple basic features and are understood only in relation to other types of media. Such an understanding cannot be achieved without adequate and detailed descriptions of common media features. Basic research in this area is vital for further progress in understanding communication in general. However, much of the exploration within the field of media studies – to be understood as the study of all types of so-called art forms (literature, music, film, and so forth) and other types of media (such as speech, gestures, blogs, news, or advertisements, whether or not perceived to be aesthetic) – is carried out without a sound conceptual groundwork.

Although advanced terminology and theoretical sophistication are certainly not lacking, the vast majority of researchers still use largely undefined and deeply ambiguous layman’s terms, such as text and image, to describe the nature of media products. Such terms refer to notoriously vague concepts and, consequently, misunderstanding and confusion are standard features of academic discussions. Attempts to create systematic and comprehensive methodologies and theoretical frameworks fail because the most basic concepts are not clearly delimited. For instance, the term text may refer to media with fundamentally different material, spatial, and temporal properties that are perceived through different physiological senses. Similarly, terms such as image and picture may refer to very different types of media. Consequentially, efforts to understand the relationship between so-called texts and images are doomed to fail. One is referred to nebulous and inadequate ideas of ‘mixtures’ of text and image.

In this study, I attempt to dig deeper. I avoid much of the standard terminology and instead delineate the essential concepts using technical terms and doing some difficult theoretical work. Readers seeking easy solutions should beware. Although brief, this work is not a quick read. It focuses on the notion that media characteristics – what we accept as information and meaning mediated by separate media – may be transferred to other media.

I suggest that theoretical studies on intermediality may be roughly divided using two main perspectives. The first is a synchronic perspective: how can different types of media be understood, analyzed, and compared in terms of the combination and integration of fundamental media traits? This viewpoint emphasizes an understanding of media as coexisting media products, media types, and media traits. The second is a diachronic perspective: how can transfer and transformation of media characteristics be comprehended and described adequately? This viewpoint emphasizes an understanding of media that includes a temporal gap among media products, media types, and media traits – either an actual gap in terms of different times of genesis or a gap in the sense that the perceiver construes the import of a medium on the basis of previously known media. The focus in this study is on this second, diachronic perspective, including an emphasis on both the notion of transfer – indicating that identifiable traits are actually relocated among media – and the notion of transformation – stressing that transfers among different media nevertheless always entail changes. Whereas I use the term intermedial to broadly refer to all types of relations among different types of media, the term transmedial should be understood to refer to intermedial relations that are characterized by actual or potential transfers.

During the investigation, distinguishing on many levels and creating a number of categories is necessary. However, note that these distinctions and categories are primarily intended to facilitate thinking about and analyzing media; they should be understood as distinctions and categories of theoretical perspectives and not as categories of media. Although thinking in terms of different categories of media products or dissimilar types of media is important and far from futile, this type of classification is secondary and becomes problematic unless it is based on a fundamental recognition of the fact that cultural phenomena, such as media, are creations of mental activity – although the mental activity is triggered by material phenomena. Therefore, we must begin with an attempt to understand the manners in which we think about media and how our cognitive activity interacts with the materiality of media during the acts of perception and interpretation. Constructing media categories is possible and meaningful only when we have a fairly solid knowledge of how essential concepts should relate to one another and how different theoretical perspectives on media may be distinguished.

Hence, I do not seek to isolate certain media products or media types and state that they are, as such, containers of transferred media characteristics. I view the notion of transfer and transformation of media as an analytical perspective: a way to methodically explore media interrelations (Elleström, 2010a: 27–35; cf. Schober, 2013: 109). All media products can be investigated from both a synchronic perspective in terms of combination and integration and a diachronic perspective in terms of transfer and transformation. Without a doubt, certain media products tend to be remarkably apt for diachronic analysis, with an emphasis on their relations to other, previously existing media products; however, no media product exists that cannot be treated in terms of media transformation without some profit. Media transformation should be understood as a term that covers the diachronic perspective on media interrelations, which goes beyond the general field of media history, that is, the study of how media types evolved and were transformed throughout the centuries.¹

Whereas the theoretical investigations in this treatise are most certainly deeply colored by my scholarly background in literature, art, music, philosophy, semiotics, interart, and intermediality studies, their results are widely applicable to the study of all types of media. To the best of my knowledge, the most acute theoretical questions regarding media transformation have been posed in these areas. Works of art constitute only one type of medium but are highly complex creations that differ in degree rather than in type from other media; therefore, wrestling with them teaches us to identify critical problems and theoretical complications that are valid for encounters with a variety of media.

Aims

The aim of this study is twofold. The first aim is to fuse a number of areas of investigation that have been unduly separated into a single overarching model of media transformation research. The second and more ambitious aim is to develop a conceptual framework that facilitates a detailed analysis of transfers of media characteristics – traits that may be understood as media form or media content. Many characteristics are actually viewed as both form and content, depending on the perspective.

The intermedial field of research includes diverse phenomena marked by transfers of media characteristics. Yet, no systematic account exists of all of these phenomena. The research is compartmentalized, which does not favor a general understanding of media transformation. Most existing studies focus on either just a few media and their specific interrelations or delimited study areas, such as ekphrasis and adaptation, which are not properly related to one another. Unless one compares notions to other notions that involve the transfer of media characteristics, the risk exists of getting stuck in isolated concepts. Delimiting a research area is rather pointless if the delimitation is not based on a thorough understanding of the broader field surrounding it.

Hence, I suggest that existing areas of research such as adaptation and ekphrasis should be fused into a broad conglomerate of transmedial research based on a common understanding of notions such as medium, mediation, transmediation, and representation, and a wide range of other important notions. In this way, essential correlations and conceptual overlaps among existing research areas, and among the many isolated studies of media transformations that do not fit very well into established research areas, can be detected. Furthermore, an overarching systematic approach to the field of media transformation is more faithful to the historic reality of transmedial relations: the limited types of media transformations selected for intensive study may be important but nevertheless exist in a historical context full of related phenomena that risk expulsion from the attention of research simply because they do not fit into existing categories.

The second aim of forming a conceptual framework that facilitates a detailed analysis of transfer of media characteristics should be viewed as an attempt to begin to solve the problem of not yet having a comprehensive theory for understanding the complex interrelations among the material and the cognitive aspects of these transfers. We need a deeper understanding of how information and meaning are modified – sometimes dramatically – when transferred among different types of media (an exceedingly common phenomenon). Ideally, such a theory must include media materiality, sensory perception, semiotics, and cognitive aspects. Beyond the borders of this brief investigation, the ultimate goal is a new and more adequate theoretical framework for media studies that provides a detailed explanation of what happens when cognitive import is changed or corrupted during transfer among different types of media. I believe that an in-depth understanding of such processes appears to be an acutely important matter with far-reaching consequences for our understanding of communication at large.

The aspects of similarities and differences among media are necessarily fundamental to this approach. To succeed, a transfer of media characteristics from one medium to another and with different traits requires that the two media nevertheless share similar capacities that, to some extent, bridge their differences. Thus, the axiomatic starting point of the investigation is that a transfer of media characteristics among different types of media always involves transformation to some degree: something is kept, something is added, and something is removed.

In the following section, I critically discuss previous attempts to map the field of media interrelations. In Chapter 2, I begin my own investigation with a rather detailed overview of the field of media transformation in a broad sense, including two fundamental types of media transformations: transmediation of media characteristics and representation of media. In Chapter 3, my next step is to explore the transmedial basis of these phenomena: what are the fundamental media properties that make media transformation possible? In Chapter 4, I sketch an elementary model for analyzing media transformations, which requires a deepened discussion of notions such as technical medium and mediation. This model is envisioned to work for all conceivable media types and to facilitate a systematic approach to media transformation. In Chapter 5, three short films by Jan Švankmajer as empirical examples are analyzed briefly to illustrate the applicability of the model and the concepts developed. Chapter 6 rounds off with a condensed demonstration of how the theoretical notions of the treatise may be used to map the border zones of intermedial and intramedial transfers of media characteristics (transfers among different media and among similar media, respectively) and final considerations.

Mapping the Field

As previously stated, the perspective of media transformation, understood as the transfer of media characteristics among media, may be understood as one of the two principal parts of the field of media interrelations – the other being the perspective of media combination and integration. I prefer to conceptualize the notion of media interrelations in this manner given its convenience and fundamental importance in distinguishing between diachronic and synchronic perspectives on intermedial relations. However, this method is certainly not the only possible way of categorizing media interrelations. In this section, I first rudimentarily sketch the background of media transformation studies and then provide a brief account of a few previous efforts to map the wider field of media interrelations. Needless to say, my surveys are very far from complete; I only attempt to highlight the theoretical approaches that come closest to and are most relevant for the development of my own theoretical framework regarding the transfer of media characteristics among dissimilar media.

Although Roman Jakobson was certainly not the first to dwell on diachronic media interrelations, his statement in a linguistic article on translation that ‘intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems’ could be viewed as the starting signal of semiotically oriented media transformation research (Jakobson, 1971 [1959]: 261). However, Jakobson was restricted by the perspective of ‘verbal’ versus ‘nonverbal’ and offered no theoretical tools for analyzing intersemiotic translation. Several decades later, Claus Clüver (1989) developed the notion of ‘intersemiotic transposition’, which was outlined as an attempt to sketch a general approach to transmedial relations broader than Jakobson’s. Despite its merits, the approach is delimited by the misleading dichotomy of ‘verbal’ versus ‘visual’ texts that obscures the complex nature of overlapping media characteristics.² Regina Schober (2010) used yet another term, ‘intermedial translation’. A recent article clarified that this term is designed to be an umbrella term covering various types of ‘intermedial transformation processes’ (Schober, 2011: 77). Because the word translation provides strong associations with transfers among different verbal languages, I prefer to refer to the notion of ‘intermedial transformation processes’ simply in terms of media transformation.

Currently, the most popular study in the field is Remediation: Understanding New Media by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999), which has been influential and important in highlighting the wide area of media transformations. The book represents an inspiring inquiry, focused on but not delimited to visual new media types. It is full of relevant observations but severely lacks in-depth theoretical discussions on the nature and different forms of ‘remediation’. The authors’ notions of media and remediation are acutely vague. In a way, my own study is an attempt to develop more finely tuned notions that rival the all-embracing concept of remediation of Bolter and Grusin, which primarily aims to explain the mechanisms in contemporary media culture.

The work of Werner Wolf is a sharp contrast to Remediation. Wolf’s The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (1999) aims to categorize and systematically investigate intermedial phenomena, and is not restricted only to the field of music and fiction. My distinction between combination and integration of media on the one hand and transfer and transformation of media on the other hand partly corresponds to Wolf’s distinction between ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ intermediality. However, I find it deeply problematic to state that an artifact of ‘overt’ intermediality is distinguished by qualities that are ‘immediately discernible on its surface’ and to delimit ‘overt’ intermediality to a narrow catego...