On the Evolution of Media. Understanding media change.

The media ecosystem

In 2002, when I returned to university after 12 years of work as an interaction designer and with a PhD thesis on interface semiotics under my arm, my colleagues considered me a ‘professor of new media’. At that time my teaching and research were very focused on the ‘new thing’. Although I perceived changes in the ‘old media’ -the newspapers of the 2000s were very different when compared with the 1980s, and the same was noticeable on television-, my object of study was another one. I suppose that the same thing happened to the colleagues who investigated the press, radio or television: they identified changes in their object of study but did not connect them with the emergence of the ‘new’. At that moment I began to intuit that we cannot understand the changes in the old media if we isolate them from the emergence of the new media, and vice versa: new media always mark the differences and hide the continuities with the old ones (if they did not, they would not be considered ‘new’ or ‘disruptive’). Even more: the very opposition between ‘new media’ and ‘old media’ does not make sense: after all, it is about media species fighting to survive in the same ecosystem. In other words, at that moment I realized that we are constrained to think in terms of an ‘ecology of media’.

Much water passed under the bridges. If in Hipermediaciones. Elementos para una teoría de la comunicación digital interactiva (Gedisa, 2008) I invoked the need of a holistic and systemic view of the mediasphere, in Ecología de los Medios (Gedisa, 2015) I had the opportunity to compile contributions from Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Robert ‘Bob‘”’ Logan, Paul Levinson, Sergio Roncallo and many other figures of Media Ecology. But by then I was already moving from the synchronous plane of media ecology to the diachronic plane of media evolution: at the International Communication Association (ICA) conference (London, 2013) I had presented a paper entitled “Media Evolution: Emergence, Dominance, Survival, and Extinction in the Media Ecology”, which received the Best Paper Award from the ICA Communication History Division and was subsequently published in the International Journal of Communication.

Beyond my interest in transmedia storytelling and new literacies, that primal tension between old and new media never left me. Remember the subtitle of the book Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins, the main work on transmedia narratives? “Where Old and New Media Collide”. I have always been passionate about the collisions between the old and the new, but also the intermedia cooperations.

The evolution of media

In 2018 I published with Fernando Rapa an object-book that, on the one hand, is a tribute to the classic The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore; on the other hand, Media Evolution. Sobre el origen de las especies mediáticas (La Marca, 2018) was the first book where I articulated what I understand by an evolutionary theory of media change. This little great book presents in a graphic, synthetic and fun way (thanks to Rapa’s magic hands) the key concepts of Media Evolution, from media life cycle to media adaptation and extinction.

But beyond our personal divertimento, the scientific community demands ‘serious’ texts (papers, books with hundreds of references, insufferable Power Points with 15-line paragraphs, etc.). A serious academic book on media evolution was the next step… Every cloud has a silver lining: I must admit that On the Evolution of Media. Understanding media change (Routledge, 2023) is a pandemic book written during the long hours of quarantine.

By now the contents of this new volume should be clear to the reader. The first part of On the Evolution of Media is dedicated to theoretical construction processes and to setting the coordinates of Media Evolution, an under construction theory or proto-discipline that is just taking its first steps. My hypothesis is this one: the evolutionary theory of media change already exists. In the last century, dozens of communication theorists have used evolutionary concepts in a more or less metaphorical way; In the book I identify, analyze and integrate many of these contributions with the aim of creating a coherent and unified theoretical framework. If communication theories have always been characterized by hyperfragmentation and dispersion, On the Evolution of Media proposes the opposite movement: as Steve Jobs would say, the book “connects the dots” by moving against the grain of this theoretical atomization.

In order to be able to theorize, the first thing we must do is to refine the concepts that we will use in our theoretical discourse. For this reason, the second part of On the Evolution of Media proposes a dictionary that explores the fundamental concepts of an evolutionary theory of media change: emergence, adaptation, survival, domination, niches, coevolution, intermediality, etc. Each chapter begins with a description of the concept in the biological field, then jumps to social sciences to end by analyzing its use in media and communication research. At the end, a case study (the emergence of the World Wide Web, the adaptation of television, the survival of the vinyl record, etc.) closes the chapter.

As Karl Popper and Charles S. Peirce teach us, every theory is always a hypothetical form of knowledge that must be tested. The third part of On the Evolution of Media presents a set of quantitative and qualitative methods that should be part of a media evolutionist’s research kit, from Franco Moretti’s distant reading to Lev Manovich’s cultural analytics or the documentary techniques applied by history and media archaeology.

On the Evolution of Media opens with a generous foreword written by Mark Deuze (University of Amsterdam) and concludes with more than 600 bibliographical references. Obviously, someone may ask me: «Why didn’t you include ___________ (fill in the blanks)? Perhaps in the next quarantine… Between the foreword and the references readers will find a polyphonic volume that proposes an integrated, intermedia, holistic, and complex vision of the evolution of media.

Closing the circle

Closing a circle that began a decade ago in London, at the recent conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) at Toronto I presented a paper entitled “Darwin Amongst the Media. The concept of ‘emergence’ in the context of an evolutionary approach to media change” based on one of the chapters of On the Evolution of Media. This paper received the Best Paper Award from the ICA Communication History Division, a recognition that surprises and excites me because it comes from a community of researchers of the highest academic level.

As my friend Alejandro Piscitelli always says in a felinesque tone, e la nave va. While the international dissemination of On the Evolution of Media is just beginning -check the video of the presentation at Massey College (University of Toronto) in very good company-, I’m already working on the Spanish translation of the book.

I hope this volume serves to spark good theoretical conversations and helps us better understand the accelerated transformation of the media ecosystem.

Play it loud!

Bonus tracks

• “Media Evolution: Emergence, Dominance, Survival, and Extinction in the Media Ecology” in the International Journal of Communication (2013).
• Introduction to “Ecología de los medios” (Gedisa, 2015) (in Spanish).
• «Evolution of the media: map of a discipline under construction. A review» in El Profesional de la Información (2022).
• Preview of On the Evolution of Media (2023). Click under the cover.