Where next after multimedia?
We live in a supposedly boundless, hyperlinked world: New media and new technology have accelerated, revolutionised and radicalised communication across space and time. Today, our media environment is seamless, with multiple media functioning simultaneously and content being shared immediately across multiple platforms, giving fillip to the idea of 'intermedia'. The way we now receive news of various kinds at the same moment – beyond the hitherto dominant print and the electronic media – on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and numerous news websites, with a lot of give and take between the media, is a typical attribute of the 'intermedia' environment. Intermedia in South Asia: The fourth screen, edited by Rajinder Dudrah, Sangita Gopal, Amit S Rai and Anustup Basu, academics associated mainly with cinema studies in the UK and USA, delves into the emerging and somewhat fuzzy media scenario, looking at the "in-betweenness" of it all, connoting lack of any fixed or specific location.
Media ecology – the exploration and analysis of our informational and cultural environments, of human orientations, values and beliefs, constructed and controlled by media and communication technologies – is a key point of analyses in the book. The field has drawn the attention of scholars for a fairly long time, yet much of it remains uncharted. In its conceptual formation, media ecology began in the 1960s with sociologist Marshall McLuhan's provocative, techno-determinist description of media as an extension of human organs. McLuhan, however, had the foresight to contend that each form of media finds its meaning and rationale for existence through its interplay with other media. But it was left to the cultural philosopher Walter J Ong and the media theorist Neil Postman, in the 1980s and 1990s, to show the way forward; they did away with crass media-and technology-centric analyses and infused a 'human factor' into the field, theorising it in terms of human perceptions and understandings. As Postman stated in an article titled 'Humanism of Media Ecology': "We put the word 'media' in the front of the word 'ecology' to suggest that we were not simply interested in media, but in the ways in which the interaction between media and human beings gives a culture its character and, one might say, helps a culture to maintain symbolic balance." These intersections and interplays between various media and human values, action and behaviour lie at the foundation of the contributions in Intermedia in South Asia.