Understanding Media Relations in the Age of Convergence: A Metatheoretical Taxonomy

Multimediality, crossmediality, intermediality, transmediality. Over the last three decades, media (as well as comparative) 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 age of convergence. 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.