From Command Line to Metaverse

DMT Part 1 - Macro Media Transformations as the Basis of Digital Media Transformations

In the past two years I’ve been working on a book on Digital Media Transformation (DMT) as a co-publisher and authored three papers on “Macro Media Transformations”. My theory in a nutshell: The underlying changes in the structure of the Internet are triggered by the emergence of new interfaces and are decisive for digital transformation as a whole.
Unfortunately I must not publish the complete text here as Springer Gabler will do this in July 2022 (in German), but I can disseminate some parts in this Substack newsletter and blog. In fact I have to because otherwise a fast paced development of reality renders my writings obsolete. When Facebook (now Meta) announced it will tap into the Metaverse it is safe to say we have officially reached Web 4.

This is the first part of the first chapter of my study “Transformations of the Macro Medium”

Transformations of the Macro Medium as the Basis of Digital Media Transformations

The comprehensive digitization of the anthroposphere is a process of the century. As an accompanying phenomenon, digital transformation goes beyond the mere digitization of all areas of life, culture and the economy and, as an effect of the transition from the analog to the digital, encompasses individual and social action in its entirety. As an individual or group, it is de facto impossible to escape the digital transformation of society[1].

The digital media change, which only prima vista concerns the transformation of individual media types or dispositifs, stands as a part in a special relationship to the digital change as a whole: With the emergence of the Internet, a new type of media has appeared that, beyond digitization, takes up other factors of transformation such as networking, convergence, capture or intermediation, among others, and, above all, existing media types in a universal dispositif. Manfred Faßler defines this macro medium, as "area-independent, territorially and physically unbounded global use of computer-based communication"[2]. In practice, the generic term macro medium exists only in the singular: there is only one Internet.

After its commissioning in the late 1960s and its expansion up to the development of the World Wide Web in 1989, the role of the Internet in the digital transformation is becoming more formative and determining as a main stream, to the point of congruence or rather lockstep of digital transformation, media transformation and macro media transformation. The successive digitization of existing media types and their consistent integration into the macro medium mean not only that the analog media world outside the Internet is visibly losing relevance, but that it has long since seemed impossible to speak of a media society that has not been caught up in the digital transformation. The transition from a pre-digital media society to a post-digital network society takes place along digital media transformations, which in turn are closely linked to the structural transformations of the macro medium and follow structural development steps –  Web 0, Web 1, Web 2, ... Web n – as definable, nameable, temporal sections. It is these macro media transformations that have determined the further course of digital change since the early 1990s (with the transition from Web 0 to Web 1).

To put it simply: with the Internet, the digital transformation has produced a structure whose modification determines the transformation itself. Every structural change in the macro medium is accompanied by the transformation of the media integrated into it and of the digital media society. If one wants to understand digital media transformations and social change as a system context - and not encounter them descriptively in a detailed aspect of the economy, mass media, politics, etc. - then a description of macro media transformations is the prerequisite for this.

---

Footnotes & References

[1]  Unless one retreats coram publico into non-digital hermitage as the Amish or lives by nature as part of an isolated people, an uncontacted community isolated from the rest of the world.

[2] Faßler, M. (1998). Makromedien. In Faßler, M., & Halbach, W. (Eds.). Geschichte der Medien (pp. 309-359). Munich: W. Fink. p. 329