The Metamedium

From a review at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

“Zielinski argues that what he calls “media” (a dense composite notion encompassing both discourse and its material supports) has vanished from the horizon because it is now ubiquitous.”

Obviously I need to read the whole book to make this claim more solidly, but nonetheless: this chimes with a chunk of my own infrastructural theory, where I claim that what we think of as “media” – which are themselves highly complex and increasingly emergent socio-technical systems – flow over and through a medium-of-media, a metamedium. That metamedium is the tangle of infrastructural socio-technical systems to which I refer as “the metasystem”, which has also been pulling a very effective disappearing trick over the last century or so.

Indeed, these two systems are effectively the public and private faces of a single coin. The metasystem is the screen upon which the Spectacle is projected; it is the conceptual veil which allows the enduring Western fiction of the social/natural dichotomy to persist, the discursive prestidigitation which distracts us from the (spatially) distant consequences of our technologically mediated consumption.

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