Media Evolution: more than a book…
My friends know that I am becoming less and less comfortable in traditional scientific writing. More than ‘uncomfortable’, I feel dissatisfied: the academic system, by focusing on scientific articles and books, does not value the production of creative texts, in innovative formats and that really make the reader reflect beyond the words. Although I am not going to stop publishing scientific texts in the usual channels, I am interested in exploring new writing styles and publishing formats. The Laws of the Interface (Gedisa, 2018) was a first step in that direction: it is a volume full of stories and anecdotes that facilitate the interaction with the reader and, although it has a high theoretical density, it can be read in a fluid way. In other words, it is a text marked by an ‘American essay style’ that puts storytelling in the foreground (like the wonderful non fiction books by Steven Johnson).
Media Evolution. On the origin of media species is another step in that direction. A big step. This time the bet is very strong: we are talking about a volume in a small format inspired by that jewel entitled The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. This volume is perhaps Marshall McLuhan’s most disruptive text in both form and content. Media Evolution, for its part, is a book-object that could only be made with the collaboration of a incredible graphic designer like Fernando Rapa. I hope McLuhan and Fiore had as much fun as we did producing this book.
From its first page, Media Evolution dialogues and pays tribute to The Medium is the Massage:
The making of
I will tell you a little about the production process of Media Evolution. More than a book, I wrote a script with two columns (text / image). The unit of measurement was the “double page.” In other words, each time the reader opens the book, she finds a consistent set of texts and images that dialogue with each other. At first we evaluated not to create “chapters”, but finally we divided the volume into a series of sections:
From there, each double page is an explosion of concepts, quotes and images that propose a reflection on the evolution of media ecosystems. In tune with the spirit of the book, I avoided chronological journeys to favor temporal hybridizations. When it came to citing strong phrases from other authors, I had to leave a few along the way to include the most useful contributions when defining a path towards the construction of a new discipline: Media Evolution.
As I said above, with Fernando Rapa we had a lot of fun working on this volume. Between beers and coffee we thoroughly chat about each page, image or design that appears in the book. Even if Fernando is fan of Estudiantes / Bilardo and I am a fan of Rosario Central / Menotti, the Argentine complicities favored the book production process.
Two other interlocutors created the conditions for this successful production: Guido Indij, an editor who loves books (and viceversa) and bet from the first minute on this volume, and Àngel Mestres from Trànsit Projectes, a creative team that manages cultural projects in Europe and Latin America.
Towards an eco-evolutionary theory of media
I once explained the origin of my interest in transmedia narratives. It was 2006 and I was very busy analyzing how new media were transforming old ones… when I came across these new narrative structures that were precisely putting the concept of ‘new’ and ‘old’ media in crisis. For several years I dedicated myself to researching transmedia narratives, a process that led me to the publication of dozens of articles and a couple of books, including Narrativa Transmedia. Cuando todos los medios cuentan (Deusto, 2013).
From that year, and in parallel with the development of the H2020 Transmedia Literacy project (2015–18), I returned to concern myself with the evolution of the media ecosystem. Both Ecología de los Medios (Gedisa, 2015) and Las Leyes de la Interfaz (Gedisa, 2018) and Media Evolution (La Marca, 2019) are representative of this new phase of my research and, as I said at the beginning of this post, of my explorations that aim to push the limits of the traditional scientific texts.
Media Evolution
Each (double) page of Media Evolution was designed to go beyond the single interpretive effects of the written text or the image: a multimodal and intertextual semiotic set interpellates the reader generating what the Russian formalists called ‘estrangement’. An example: tje famous phrase by Alan Kay (“Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born”) not only calls into question our conception of “technology” and alerts about its naturalization: it also allowed us to play with the most famous ellipsis in film history (Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 femur transforming into a spaceship) and translate it into the format of Eadweard Muybridge’s early movement studies in the late 19th century. In other words, on the same page we put Alan Kay, Stanley Kubrick and Eadweard Muybridge to dialogue. These intertextual and multimodal dialogues appear on many (double) pages of the book.
In the book the reader will find everything, from reflections of a pixelated Umberto Eco to disruptive ideas by Bruce Sterling about the danger of extinction of the great media reptiles of the Jurassic, through personal contributions on the different phases of evolution media, the differences between media evolution, history and archeology, or key concepts such as ‘prosumer’, ‘media diet’, ‘adaptation’, ‘extinction’, ‘coevolution’, ‘punctuated equilibrium’ or ‘interface’. If The Simpsons appear on a page near the end, at the beginning of the book we can see Charles Chaplin in Modern Times tightening the nuts, not far from Batman and Robin scaling a cardboard wall in the 1960s, a selfie taken by a monkey and Hitler memes.
Rather than writing a book, I have the feeling of having ‘assembled’ it through a process of creation and selection of small textual units (verbal and iconic) that Fernando was in charge of putting together.
The spoilers end here. From now on, the ball passes into the field of readers. The book is already in Latin American and Spanish bookstores, and it is available on Amazon.es, Casa del Libro and La Marca (sorry, no ePub version… it is a book-object!). In the last year we presented Media Evolution in Argentina, Ecuador, México and Spain. The second edition will be ready in 2021.
Good reading!
