Abstract
The nature of contemporay media forms has become so wide that the transformational processes they trigger in human experience cannot be distinguished from one another any more. Who can say what a medium is, who can describe the ontological nature of an individual medium without referencing the other media? Today, we discuss the new media in the plural, while their impact actually seems to have taken the shape of one macro entity that, complex, dynamic and manifold, affects the modes of sensorial perception and the forms of knowledge at the same time and on many levels. In other words, it is not so easy to tell the effects of a particular media apart from those of another, as it was still possible until a few decades ago.
Therefore, would it be possible to conceive a book today the way McLuhan conceived Understanding Media? What would be the use of defining the effects of one medium, when that same medium would be pointless without the presence of the other media? The relations, and reactions, connecting the expressive forms have overridden the individual forms, their reciprocal connections have become so tight they have started to crossbreed, in other words they have established, or revealed, a new kind of entity, to define which new terms and paradigms of thought are required. Rather than the existence of one form, it is necessary to recognize that this systemic configuration of the contemporary media environment implies the existence of a new kind of forming function that transcends the individual forms all while embracing them. Such transcendent forming function of the media is not just literally trans-forming, or capable of inducing a change in the forms of human experience. The process through which the contemporary media environment exerts its shaping power should be defined as a wider ranging, more complex process, that it is therefore only apt to literally define as a meta-process.
That said, what meaning should be attritubed to the meta-understanding evoked in the title of this short essay, and what benefit would derive from considering the media as a ‘metaform’?
To address the first question, it is well known that the suffix meta is connected to the concept of crossing, transcendence, or going beyond one’s discourse while still referring to the self. Metaform is what transcends, what goes beyond an individual form; it is the form taken by the combined forms, the form of the ratio between forms. It is very similar to the procedural modes that guide complex dynamic systems; it is an operating principle that belongs to any individual form within an aggregate of forms and at the same time regulates their structural relations. In brief – but this issue would deserve an exploration in itself – the expressive forms of human culture work as complex systems, and for this reason it is necessary to adopt a meta-understanding, one that would reach the transcendent, invisible, and in many ways homotethic – in geometrical terms – or homological – according to a terminology also adopted in the humanistic realm – or environmental aspects, as implied by the approach typical of media ecology.
With regard to the second question – what benefit would derive from considering the media as a ‘metaform’? – we could add that all this is beneficial in many ways. First of all, because the meta approach can bring the individual dimension of human experience back to the collective, social and cultural dimension. Today the social media are all the rage. Still, in spite of the wide range of meanings this phrase acquires at present, one cannot ignore that, in many ways, the media have always been social. No medium could possibly be conceived outside its social dimension. Secondly, the meta approach allows us to conceive the aesthetic experience in its plurality; the effect of a medium never acts on one sense alone, the perceptive components are never stimulated separately when they interact with the media. A sensorial plurality is always triggered as an effect of the media. Media aesthetics is always synaesthetic, or even meta-aesthetic, where what counts is precisely the connection, relation, the dynamics – the ‘translation’, as McLuhan would say – between the senses, as a process that surpasses the individual perceptive components. Thirdly, as implied by the semantic–linguistic use of the word ‘metaform’, the contemporary media are the factual expression of human culture as increasingly dependent on its material nature. This fact is there for all to see. In other words, the contemporary media let us touch, substantiate dynamics and evolutions that would basically remain abstract or hidden; they make us experience the relevance of cultural processes with more awareness than in the past, by transferring them from their invisible dimension to daily life, if anything because we are more aware of the media’s relevance for us.
According to McLuhan, a higher aesthetic awareness emerges from a plural approach to the media, an approach to the media as a metaform. Indeed, far from just shaping and transforming the human experience, the very function of the media is their meta function – their crossing, overcoming, activating a process whereby the human experience is led beyond, across. What are the media if not a way to cross, surpass, stretch the boundaries of human cognitive perceptive functions? The contemporary media environment has revealed a revolution of the forms that has constantly and silently been part of human culture. Meta-understanding media, thus exploring the media as a metaform will help us capture the very essence of their causal nature, going beyond while carrying something else with us that is nothing but an expression of the nomadic nature of existence; perhaps it will show us how we can try to grasp something more about the contemporary man, shaped and moulded by the always new forms of human ecology.