AGAINST POST-MEDIALITY. SEMIOTIC AND AESTHETIC REFLECTIONS FOR A MORE COMPLEX VISION OF THE MEDIA SYSTEM

In order to explain the many changes the media system is going through, some scholars propose to start thinking that we live in the post-media condition. A good way to schematize their vision of things is in the words of Eugeni (2015: 27-28): “The media are everywhere. We ourselves are the media. And this is the reason why the media don’t exist anymore”. What they point out is that today it doesn’t make sense to distinguish between a medium and another, as we used to do in the field of media studies. However, many authors of nowadays manuals for the creation of trans-media, cross-media or inter-media communication projects, whose increasing diffusion and importance is one of the main reasons why the changes of the media system are becoming so visible, still underline that even if they aim at creating involving and very immersive experiences, they don’t forget that every single medium of their media mix is different from the other and that it must be used with a specific function. This is very important to give their addressees the possibility to deal with the complex communicative architectures they produce. Given these opposite ways of thinking to nowadays media, this article aims at defining the theory of the post-media condition, reflecting on the advantages and on the disadvantages of using it and then at proposing another metaphor, the one of complexity, to understand what the media system is becoming today, without abandoning the idea that there is still a difference between a medium and another.