The Digital Mediation of Knowledge, Representations and Practices through the Lenses of a Multimodal Theory of Communication

The concept of “medium of communication” started to gain momentum at the end of the 19th century, as a result of the emergence and dissemination of technical media, such as the phonograph, the telegraph and daguerreotypes. These media had a far greater impact and effect on human beings as regards broadening their spatial and temporal boundaries than ever before experienced as they triggered an increasingly democratic expansion of human perception of temporality and spatiality. As the early 20th century’s avant-garde movements clearly show, intellectuals, writers and artists began to reflect and experiment in ways that transcended the concepts of imitation or mimesis that had dominated the history of fine arts and representation since their definition in Aristotle’s Poetics. Yet, it was only in the 1950s that a major theory of communication was developed, when two mathematicians, Shannon and Weaver (1949), worked on the problem of how best to encode the information a sender wishes to transmit. In the context of this theory, any communicative medium was considered simply as a container while mediation was merely a chain-like process that permitted messages to be transmitted, i.e. nothing more than a technical action with no effects on the nature of the contents. In the 1960s, the work of Marshall McLuhan, popularized by the famous statement “the medium is the message” (1964: 9), brought about a profound rethinking of this model, shifting the focus onto the transformative role that the medium itself plays in communication and, hence, suggesting that a medium’s intrinsic and extrinsic features affect not just content and participants but can, ultimately, transform society