1262603 Understanding Media Relations: A Metatheoretical
Taxonomy
Organizer(s):
Federico Zecca, University
of Bari, Italy (federicozecca@gmail.com)
Multi-mediality, cross-mediality, inter-mediality, trans-mediality. Over the last three decades, media (as well as literary) studies have been characterized by the emergence of new categories, aimed at describing and analysing the variety of relations established by different media in the post-digital mediasphere. Despite their widespread diffusion in many research fields, however, these categories still lack a shared and stable meaning, having eluded any attempt of theoretical systematization so far. As a consequence, they tend to overlap semantically, making it impossible for scholars to share a common vocabulary. The objective of this paper is to propose a meta-theoretical rearrangement of the abovementioned categories, with the aim of outlining a systematic taxonomy in which each term can find a definition and a position. To achieve this objective, first of all I will distinguish between different typologies of media relation, considering three heuristic levels: 1. The plane of the medium on which these relations are established; 2. The kind of content exchanged between different media; 3. The modality through which different media connect with each other. Secondly, through the analysis of selected case studies from contemporary film and media production, I will link each of the four categories to a specific typology of media relations, with the intent of inter-define their meanings and their mutual borders.