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.
The coming of the digital frame as the 'fourth screen' has led to a huge qualitative change, compelling media theorists to focus on coevolution of two kinds: human-media coevolution – how audiences coevolve with their respective media and how media coevolve with audiences; and intermedia coevolution, how two or more media coevolve together. Before the coming of the digital age, the overwhelming thrust of media analysis, albeit with some notable exceptions, was on exploring the 'world of media' from a supposedly external vantage point. Analysts used to focus on a specific form of media, such as radio, and its good and bad attributes, under the assumption that analog media operated in discrete time and space, and with stipulated functions. With the late-20th century variety of globalisation and the spectacular increase in the power and reach of new information technology, as text, audio and visual media converged, the analytical focus shifted to the nature and consequences of intersections and also to the new dual role of the people as both producers and consumers of messages.
However, the current focus on media ecology has brought with it the hegemonic logic of mediatisation theory, which argues that the demands of the prevalent media shape political discourses and processes, creating, in the words of the theorist Kent Asp, "a political system [that] to a high degree is influenced by and adjusted to the demands of the mass media in their coverage of politics." In this view, the seamless, digital multimedia media saturates society to the point that we can no longer understand the media as being separate from other institutions. Everything around us is not just being mediated – packaged and presented to us via various forms of media – but mediatised as well. This is an inherently political process, changing the way we communicate and the way we understand the world as each of us includes and excludes certain perspectives and opinions from among the options the media presents to us. The book provokes the readers to reflect on the scenario depicted here, on the emerging routes of digital culture and intermedia experience.