Intermediality

KLAUS BRUHN JENSEN

University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Intermediality refers to the interconnectedness of modern media of communication.

As means of expression and exchange, different media refer to and depend on one
another, both explicitly and implicitly; they interact as elements of various communica-
tive strategies; and they are constituents of a wider social and cultural environment.
While intermediality might be taken to include any relation whatsoever between
media, three different conceptions can be identified in communication research, deriv-
ing from three notions of what a medium is in the first place. First, the term denotes
communication through several discourses at once, including through combinations
of different sensory modalities of interaction, for instance music and moving images.
Second, intermediality represents the combination of separate material vehicles of rep-
resentation, as exemplified by the use of print, electronic, and digital platforms in a
communication campaign. Third, intermediality addresses the interrelations among the
media as institutions in society—interrelations that are captured in technological and
economic terms such as convergence and concentration.

Discursive intermediality

As a term and as an explicit theoretical concept, intermediality has been most widely
used with reference to multiple discourses and modalities of experience and represen-
tation, as examined in aesthetic and other humanistic traditions of communication
research (Paech & Schröter, 2007). Crediting the British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge
with a use of “intermedium” as early as 1812, in 1965 Dick Higgins reintroduced
“intermedia” to the field of art theory in order to account for the characteristics and
practices of the Fluxus movement (Higgins, 1965/2001). In accordance with such an
avant-garde orientation, the intermedia terminology has been employed to stress the
innovative or transgressive potential of artworks that articulate their message in the
interstices between two or more media forms. Examples include the practice of art as
installation, as event, or as performance. In comparison, “mixed media” suggests a
more neutral, instrumental combination of several material means of representation,
typically in museums and other established institutions of art. A related notion,
Gesamtkunstwerk (“composite artwork”), which is attributed to the composer Richard
Wagner, addresses the potential of reintegrating—originally and still in an aesthetic
frame of reference—the theater, music, and visual arts of ancient Greek drama.
In media and communication studies, an aesthetic and broadly discursive approach
to the media is the legacy of the humanities. Traditionally, the humanities have
The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy.
Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Robert T. Craig (Editors-in-Chief), Jefferson D. Pooley and Eric W. Rothenbuhler (Associate Editors).
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect170
2 IN T E R M E D I A L I T Y

focused on media as “texts”: delimited objects of immanent analysis and interpretation

as sources of introspection and insight, typically unique artworks that, arguably,
transcend historical time. In the course of the 20th century, humanistic scholarship
gradually came to recognize texts as any vehicle of meaning, for example images,
conversations, or everyday artifacts. This was, in part, the response of academia to a
changing social environment of culture and communication. As long as the legitimate
objects of analysis remained a comparatively few canonical or prototypical works,
it might seem natural to study such texts only, as privileged instances of cultural
traditions. With global mass media, such an approach became increasingly untenable;
with networked forms of communication, the relations between (that is, “inter”)
various media have acquired an evident centrality.
The idea of intermediality was preceded by an idea of “intertextuality,” which sug-
gests that texts are momentary manifestations of a more general “textuality.” Texts are
selective articulations of a cultural heritage; a culture could be understood as the most
complex instance of textuality and intertextuality. The Latin root of “text” (the verb
texere) means to “weave,” be it a fabric or an account, and the term highlights the
process through which a content of ideas is given form—in-formed. For centuries, the
traditions of rhetoric and hermeneutics had approached texts as composite structures
of meaning—structures organized in layers, webs, and circles. What theories of inter-
textuality began to emphasize was the contingency and transience of texts—in contrast
to any transcendence of either content or form. Neither literary works nor other types
of messages should be considered sites of essential or stable meanings. Texts make sense
not in themselves, but in relation to other texts.
The seminal idea of intertextuality had been advanced by the Russian literary scholar
Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle in the early decades of the 20th century (Bakhtin,
1981). One of his key concepts concerning the relationship between literary works,
“dialogism,” was translated as “intertextuality” by Julia Kristeva (1974/1984). As a
part of a redevelopment of the original notion in the context of French structuralism
and semiotics, Kristeva reemphasized that not just texts, but all signs are defined and
understood in relation to other signs. As complex signs, texts acquire meaning as part
of complex networks of texts, past as well as present: A current text in one medium
resonates with meanings from cultural history as well as from other, contemporary
media, genres, and representations.
Since the 1970s, notions of intertextuality and intermediality have been widely
influential across literary studies, cultural studies, and communication research. The
assumption is that all texts—all human acts of communication—are created equal, at
least in principle. Thus the task of the researcher would be to examine how different
texts with particular origins and trajectories feed into various cultural patterns and
social settings. On the other hand, and ironically, studies in this vein have tended to
address interrelations among a small, select group of texts. A preferred methodology
has been one of formal and thematic readings of literature, visual arts, film, and tele-
vision; studies have identified a wide variety of explicit and, more commonly, implicit
references across texts—for instance metatextual relations concerning the historical
origins of key cultural symbols, or paratextual relations between a novel and its cover
text (Genette, 1982/1997). Less attention has been given to the empirical readers or
 IN T E R M E D I A L I T Y 3

audiences of the texts, who presumably are the interpretive agents establishing the
actual links between the multiple nodes of textual networks. From the 1980s, however,
humanistic studies of media as texts came to devote more explicit attention to empirical
audiences in qualitative reception studies.
An important contribution (Fiske, 1987) distinguished two aspects of intertextual-
ity: horizontal and vertical. The horizontal aspect refers to the traditional and most
common understanding of intertextuality in literary studies as the transfer of meaning
through historical time—over decades, centuries, even millennia—as accumulated in
the symbols, characters, and styles of both fine arts and popular media. Vertical inter-
textuality, in contrast, was introduced by Fiske (1987) to highlight the media system
that circulates topics, themes, and agendas in shorter time frames—from minutes to
months. One additional point of Fiske’s vertical intertextuality was to include audi-
ence members as media in their own right, who may respond to and debate among
themselves the contents as well as the forms of media texts. In this way, humans can
be understood as media and as participants in wider processes of intermediality and
communication.
Within this two-dimensional systematic, Fiske (1987) identified three categories of
texts (Figure 1). Primary texts can be understood as vehicles of important information
or insight in their own right; they are not necessarily aesthetic masterpieces or innova-
tive media products, but nevertheless privileged texts. As an illustration, if the primary
text is a new feature movie, the secondary texts will be studio publicity, reviews, and
other criticism and debate. The tertiary texts, finally, are audiences’ conversations and
other communications about the movie in question—before, during, and after a visit to
the cinema or another encounter with the primary text.

VERTICAL INTERTEXTUALITY

Tertiary texts:
conversation
about media

Secondary texts:
references
within media

Related Related Earlier Earlier

genres, figures or texts in the texts in the
figures, actors same genre same series
themes

HORIZONTAL INTERTEXTUALITY PRIMARY TEXT

Figure 1 Horizontal and vertical intertextuality.

4 IN T E R M E D I A L I T Y

A range of studies have explored the trajectories of texts across different media, audi-
ence groups, and time periods. Research has examined, for instance, cultural icons such
as James Bond and the Batman, which provide rich frames of reference for political
as well as existential reflections. Beyond immanent and comparative textual analyses,
methodologies have included oral history interviews and analyses of the creations of
fan cultures. In the case of television, viewers shape their own intertextual sequences
by selecting and combining (parts of) programs, preannouncements, and commercial
breaks from multiple channels within the flow of any given viewing session. However,
as suggested by the terminology of primary, secondary, and tertiary texts (Fiske, 1987),
intertextual studies have still tended to approach the entire social process of commu-
nication from the perspective of texts and media, as if meaning generally could be said
to flow from a relatively few mass media, perhaps via other media and texts, and on to
audiences, or users.
Digital technologies prompted renewed theoretical and empirical scrutiny of the very
idea of media, including examination of the ways in which one medium may reproduce
as well as reshape another medium in a process of remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 1999).
A key aspect of digital media is that they facilitate distributed processes in which users
interact with texts, and with each other through texts. Digitalization, in a sense, trans-
formed implicit intertextuality into different forms of explicit hypertextuality: hyper-
links that relate various computer-mediated texts, genres, and applications. Links let
users identify, retrieve, and modify what might otherwise have remained more or less
incidental associations in the mind of either a sender or a receiver. Hypertexts range
from instrumental structures for purposes of indexing, archiving, and combining items
of information, to creative instances of digital storytelling. And, like other “texts” in the
broad sense of the word, hypertexts will mix alphabetic, visual, and auditory modalities
of communication.
The idea of hypertexts goes back at least to Vannevar Bush’s (1945/1999) early
notion of a personalized information resource, the Memex; technical principles of
hypertextuality were laid out by Ted Nelson (1965). In the early 21st century, the
World Wide Web represents the most massive example of a multimodal hypertext that
weaves “texts” into a worldwide network. A key research question regarding the Web
and other digital media is how, in concrete practice, users approach and employ this
wealth of texts and their constitutive elements. The Web reemphasizes the point that
texts are much more than representations of, or items of information about, the world.
Texts no less than media are resources of human action and social interaction. In this
perspective, the Web offers a point of access to other media, genres, and texts with
diverse functionalities, which are supported by graphic user interfaces and browsers
and by a distinctive intertextual resource: search engines that identify, relate, and rank
the texts that users may want to explore and weave further.

Material intermediality

Whereas the term “intermediality” most often signals discursive approaches to media
and texts, media are also interrelated as material means of interaction. This has been the
 IN T E R M E D I A L I T Y 5

point of departure for research traditions on “media ecology” and “medium theory.” In
an overview of medium theory, Meyrowitz (1994, p. 50) summed up a key question:
“What are the relatively fixed features of each means of communicating and how do
these features make the medium physically, psychologically, and socially different from
other media and from face-to-face interaction?” Responses to this question have been
proposed not just by communication theorists, but by historians and anthropologists as
well. In communication research, the seminal contributions came from Harold A. Innis
and his student, Marshall McLuhan.
While Meyrowitz’s (1994) original question and much research in the field have
treated face-to-face interaction as a bottom line to which various technologically medi-
ated forms of communication could be contrasted and compared, digital technologies
have presented new issues, regarding both the dividing line between embodied and
technologial media and the role of the digital computer as a new category of medium.
Jensen (2010) suggested a typology of media of three degrees, in which humans qualify
as media and the digital computer constitutes a “metamedium” embedding previous
historical media forms.
In the perspective of communication history and theory, human beings can be
understood as media of the first degree. The human body is a versatile material plat-
form and a host to speech, song, dance, drama, painting, and creative arts in general,
all of which are capacities that may be cultivated, by children and by professional
artists, into competences. In this capacity, the human body is a necessary and sufficient
condition of communication, even if our bodies are cultivated into being productive
and receptive media of communication through prolonged and complex processes
of socialization and acculturation. In comparison, tools—whether writing utensils or
musical instruments—are neither necessary nor sufficient, despite the fact that they
extend the human body and its communicative capacities in significant ways.
Embodied communication is most commonly associated with spoken language and
oral interaction. The manifold conversations that link family and friends, neighbors
and coworkers, in small groups and medium-size communities are essential to all
social life. Certainly, face-to-face interaction covers several modalities of expression;
other people appear to us as audiovisual media and in multimodal communication.
Verbal language, nevertheless, represents a privileged modality—in evolutionary,
psychological, and social terms. Language relays categorial information that can
be recategorized—responded to, restated, and rejected—in ways that no other
modality can.
In historical perspective, until quite recently, bards or singers were the only media
around: singular and localized, if ambulating archives of information and means of
communicating a cultural heritage. Research on nonliterate, prehistoric societies has
described these societies as context-bound and present-oriented. Also, medium the-
ory suggests that primary orality—a state of culture that is “totally untouched by any
knowledge of writing or print” (Ong, 1982, p. 11)—is incompatible with the sense of a
specific historical past and of a different future. Here communication is an expression
and an event in context, rather than a representation and a resource across contexts.
Ong (1982), further, identified a contrast between this primary orality and a secondary
orality, which he associated with the spoken word of broadcasting. Addressing the oral
6 IN T E R M E D I A L I T Y

characteristics of some digital media forms, research has also occasionally referred to
such forms as instances of tertiary orality.
Writing, while referred to by Jensen (2010) as a medium of the first degree, poses
special issues of categorization. On the one hand, manuscripts have supported complex
economic, scientific, and social systems for millennia, fixating information as knowl-
edge and facilitating the reflective production of ever more knowledge. On the other
hand, manuscripts have typically amounted to being constituents of wider practices
of interaction in a multistep flow of communication. Because these copies were few
and precious, they would be distributed in a highly selective fashion between central
individuals within established institutions. These individuals—priests, generals, literate
servants—would pass on even more selective and contextually adjusted information
along with oral commentary, as part of existing social and organizational hierarchies.
In a scribal culture, communication remains an event that is primarily enacted in local
contexts by embodied individuals. Even a utopian state that supported the copying of as
many manuscripts as possible for as wide a range of readers (and additional writers) as
possible would require human labor on a scale that made anything approaching equal
access to the historically and culturally available stock of knowledge inconceivable.
Whereas handwriting remains a key cultural practice, it was replaced, as a medium
of record and as a vehicle of interaction within and between the major institutions of
modern society, by media of the second degree. The media known for much of the 20th
century as “mass media” distribute the same, or similar, messages from a relatively few
centralized senders to many distributed receivers. Their common features were, first,
one-to-one reproduction, storage, and representation of a particular content. Second,
media of the second degree radically extended the dissemination of and access to infor-
mation across space and time, irrespective of the presence and number of participants.
With particular reference to photography, film, and radio, the philosopher Walter
Benjamin defined mass media in terms of their technical reproduction—specifically,
the reproduction of artworks; but this was a process with important implications for
other communicative practices as well (Benjamin, 1936/1977). In a longer historical
perspective, media of the second degree include various analog technologies—from
printed books and newspapers to film, radio, and television. All of these media took
social shape as one-to-many institutions and practices of communication, feeding into
fundamental social transformations. Books, pamphlets, and other printed formats
could be considered a necessary (though far from sufficient) condition of Renaissance
and Reformation. Newspapers served as material vehicles of political revolutions and
in the formation of modern nation-states. The printing press thus helped to shape the
modern understanding of religion as a personal matter and of politics as a public matter.
It should be noted that multistep communication remained constitutive of print and
electronic cultures. Access to printed materials has remained limited by the economic
means and literacy levels of many or most people in different historical and geographical
settings, just as reading aloud remains a significant cultural practice. Moreover, readers
became writers, entering comments or “marginalia” (Jackson, 2001)—perhaps along-
side those that already appeared in book margins—and thus anticipating user tags in
digital media. And both fans and mainstream audiences will rework and apply media
contents as part of localized and contextualized cultural practices. This intertwining of
 IN T E R M E D I A L I T Y 7

face-to-face and technologically mediated interaction was given new material shape in
digital media.
The digital computer represents a third degree of medium, or what has been referred
to as a “metamedium” (Kay & Goldberg, 1977/1999). The implication is that different
media can be reproduced and recombined on the same technological or material plat-
form. Among traditional media, books, newspapers, film, radio, and television have all,
to varying degrees, become available on digital platforms. These same platforms also
support an open-ended variety of new media forms, from online games to social net-
work sites. For communication theory, these developments have raised new questions
concerning the definition of media—as discourses, as materials, and as institutions.
For some time the central example of media of the third degree was that of personal
computers, whether stationary or portable, linked in networks. More recently, mobile
telephones and other portable devices have become equally important and versatile
means of communication; in some regions of the world, smartphones typically
represent the first point of access to the Internet for the general population (rather than
being a medium that supplements or replaces personal computers). At the same time,
another generation of digital media has been emerging, which is sometimes referred
to as “ubiquitous computing.” Mark Weiser, who coined this phrase (Weiser, 1991),
contrasted ubiquity with virtuality. During the 1980s and the 1990s virtual media
environments sought to generate “the world in a medium”—one local, stationary, and
multimodal interface that included things like gloves, goggles, and a treadmill, all of
which enabled users to enter a separate, virtual reality. In comparison, ubiquitous
computing suggests the idea of “the world as a medium”—one that embeds multiple
processors and interfaces into diverse natural objects, artifacts, and social settings,
through which users access information as part of their ongoing local activities. In a
longer perspective, such developments have been associated with the notion of an “In-
ternet of things” in which, for example, infrastructures such as roads and power systems
are datafied and deliver information for purposes of planning and regulating social
interaction.
Figure 2 sums up an understanding of three degrees of media. Humans represent a
first degree of embodied media, whose capacities have been extended first by mechani-
cal and electronic technologies and, next, by digital technologies. Figure 2 further sug-
gests that media of the third degree return to, and overlap with, some of the multimodal
and interactive forms of communication associated with face-to-face interaction. And
Figure 2 recognizes the porous lines and interchanges between the three degrees of
media, as constituents of a common wheel of culture that turns in and through com-
munication.

Institutional intermediality

Also as institutions, the modern media of communication are interrelated, both

among themselves and with other key social institutions. They constitute a cultural
environment, by analogy with the natural environment, insofar as media condition
the communications that orient other social interactions. Anthropologists such as
8 IN T E R M E D I A L I T Y

Media of
first degree

Media of Media of
third degree second degree

Figure 2 Media of three degrees.

Claude Lévi-Strauss have spoken of animals and artifacts as “objects to think with” in
particular cultural contexts: concrete points of reference for deliberation and doubt.
Media can be considered “institutions to think with”: highly differentiated and widely
distributed infrastructures that enable reflection and interaction across space and time.
Whereas other terms and concepts are more commonly used in research regarding
media as institutions, intermediality draws attention to specific interrelations and
interchanges between media also at the organizational and structural levels.
The nature of individual reflection and social interaction through the media depends
on the latter’s organization, financing, and regulation as institutions. In one regard, the
media can be said to constitute one social institution: a generalized symbolic resource
for addressing what is, what could be, and what ought to be. In other regards, the media
represent more or less specialized sites of deliberation about the ends and means of dif-
ferent aspects of political, economic, and everyday life. News media, for one, serve as an
institution that monitors and debates other social institutions of power, as summed up
by the characterization of the press as a “fourth estate.” Here the interrelations are estab-
lished not so much between media, but between genres with particular communicative
functions: The news genre and the various subgenres of journalism provide formats and
frameworks in which public political communication, broadly speaking, can be carried
on and into a whole range of social contexts, including face-to-face interaction or media
of the first degree. In other cases, entertainment genres amount to packages of content
that are available in similar or related media and accessible to different audiences in dif-
ferent contexts of use, as illustrated by feature films that become television series, books,
or computer games.
As institutions, the media have been shaped by shifting configurations of economic,
political, and technological forces. The general process of institutional intermediality
 IN T E R M E D I A L I T Y 9

and its historical trajectory can be laid out with reference to three concepts: concentra-
tion, conglomeration, and convergence.
Concentration, first of all, presents a classic consideration in most forms of material
production. If one or a few companies dominate particular markets through ownership,
agreements, or other forms of control over the means of production and distribution,
this may affect the price as well as the quality of products, against the best interests of
the communities or societies being served by those markets. In the case of the media,
the quality of public debate is ultimately at stake. Institutional intermediality may limit
communicative diversity. One example is that of newspaper chains, which might result
in standardized and substandard information to diverse readerships in their roles as
publics. The regulation of broadcasting around the world has also had to address the
issue of concentration: Given the limited available bandwidth for traditional radio and
television signals, the relatively few channels in any given market have been required
to operate “in the public interest” or as a public service, in historically and culturally
variable interpretations of what this involves.
Conglomeration, too, represents a general concern in different sectors of the econ-
omy, particularly after World War II, and media conglomerates such as Disney are
among the most familiar instances. Conglomerates join two or more corporations that
operate in otherwise different areas of business in a configuration of parent compa-
nies and subsidiaries. While this may be a financial strategy for dividing and diversify-
ing investments, conglomeration often takes advantage of an intermedial synergy that
involves product development and marketing; animated figures can be encountered on
large and small screens, as toys, and in theme parks.
With digitalization, the dynamics of the interplay between economic, technological,
and other institutional factors have been altered once again. Vertical integration—in
which several stages of producing and distributing one media content are con-
trolled by one company, and which carries a resemblance to both concentration and
conglomeration—has been associated, for instance, with the cinema: Companies might
benefit from controlling the entire value chain, from production through distribution
to exhibition. In digital media systems these stages are redefined in important ways.
Two cases in point are Apple and Google. In addition to producing and distributing
hardware and software, Apple controls an entire ecosystem of access to and use
of information and communication. As a media company, Google integrates three
functions that tended to remain separate business domains in the case of classic mass
media: Google is a content provider, an advertising agency, and a ratings firm that
correlates content searches advertising and monetizes the outcome (Lee, 2011). Given
these features, both Google and Apple can be taken to illustrate a broader development
of institutional intermediality.
The concept of convergence is associated specifically with technological, economic,
and cultural aspects of the interrelations between media. A widespread assumption has
been that digitalization would result in a merging of previously separate media and
communicative practices. Research, on the one hand, has specified different technolog-
ical and institutional aspects of convergence. Several kinds of networks may distribute
the same content; several kinds of content may be joined in one network or channel;
and several platforms or devices may serve as points of access to different networks
10 IN T E R M E D I A L I T Y

and contents. On the other hand, researchers have become increasingly critical of the
common implication that convergence might be a megatrend with a predictable end-
point. Their skepticism has been supported by developments such as the merger of
TimeWarner and America Online (AOL) in 2000. TimeWarner had a large archive of
entertainment content and AOL had the networks to distribute it; but the merger did not
live up to expectations, and AOL again became an independent company. The current
state of the media sector suggests that different kinds of media are involved in multi-
ple open-ended processes of converging (and sometimes diverging), rather than being
already converged or likely to reach such a steady state in the near future.
Like the press, other media have been widely recognized as institutions with a
special social standing and an important public brief. Not only are media interrelated
among themselves; they are also interrelated with other key institutions as constituents
of contemporary social infrastructures. This understanding of the media has received
considerable attention in research carried out during recent decades from some-
what different perspectives, namely those of the postindustrial society, the control
revolution, the information society, and the network society. These perspectives
suggest that media as commonly understood—public resources of representation and
interaction—are structured and transformed as an intermedial whole and as part of
broader economic, political, and technological transformations.
The account of a postindustrial society (Bell, 1973) began to suggest that material
forces beyond those of industrial production were becoming key to social and historical
change. By 1945 most of the workforce in the industrialized West was occupied in
immaterial labor; theoretical knowledge had become a strategic resource both in the
private and in the public sectors; and social systems of production and administration
were subject to increasing measures of technological coordination. Beniger (1986)
offered the further, important specification that information technologies and other
systems of coordination did not replace previous technologies or forms of production
but rather helped to solve a “crisis of control” in the decades around 1900: Both the
scale of material production and the related need for social integration had reached
a degree of complexity that required a “control revolution”—as implemented in part
through information and communication technologies. These accounts drew attention
to the structural continuity between an “industrial society” and an “information
society”: Industrial society had generated both massive productive capacities and
acute problems of how to administer and legitimate these capacities through pub-
licly available information and communication technologies of deliberation and
debate—“the media.”
The idea of an information society has been complemented by the idea of a network
society (Castells, 1996). The implication is that material networks of information and
communication promote networked forms of social life, including globalized firms and
political movements, as part of an informational capitalism replacing industrial cap-
italism. Some research on networked forms of cooperation and communication has
suggested the progressive potential of nonmarket and nonstate forms of material and
other social production, rooted in civil society (Benkler, 2006). As with the informa-
tion society, one contentious issue regarding the network society remains whether such
developments might fundamentally challenge existing structures of power and privilege
 IN T E R M E D I A L I T Y 11

by empowering individuals and groups in and through new institutional networks of

communication and collaboration.
In sum, the concept of intermediality highlights the interrelated discourses of
communication that the general public encounters via interrelated media technologies
throughout contemporary everyday life. In a wider sense, intermediality can be under-
stood as one aspect of a modern social formation permeated by general technologies
of information and communication that lend themselves to specific applications in
material production, political governance, and cultural life, as currently captured by
descriptions such as “the information society” and “the network society.”

SEE ALSO: Aesthetics; Bakhtin, Mikhail; Information Society; Media Ecology;

Medium; Metamedium; Network Society; Remediation; Semiotics; Text

References and further readings

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Bell, D. (1973). The coming of post-industrial society. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Beniger, J. (1986). The control revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, W. (1936/1977). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In J. Curran,
M. Gurevitch, & J. Woollacott (Eds.), Mass communication and society (pp. 384–408). London,
UK: Edward Arnold.
Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and free-
dom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Bush, V. (1945/1999). As we may think. In P. A. Mayer (Ed.), Computer media and communica-
tion: A reader (pp. 23–36). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Fiske, J. (1987). Television culture. London, UK: Methuen.
Genette, G. (1982/1997). Palimpsests: Literature in the second degree. Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press.
Higgins, D. (1965/2001). Intermedia. Leonardo, 34(1), 49–54.
Jackson, H.-J. (2001). Marginalia: Readers writing in books. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Jensen, K. B. (2010). Media convergence: The three degrees of network, mass, and interpersonal
communication. London, UK: Routledge.
Kay, A., & Goldberg, A. (1977/1999). Personal dynamic media. In P. A. Mayer (Ed.), Computer
media and communication: A reader (pp. 111–119). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1974/1984). Revolution in poetic language. New York, NY: Columbia University
Press.
Lee, M. (2011). Google ads and the blindspot debate. Media, Culture & Society, 33(3), 433–447.
Meyrowitz, J. (1994). Medium theory. In D. Crowley & D. Mitchell (Eds.), Communication theory
today (pp. 50–77). Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Nelson, T. H. (1965). Complex information processing: A file structure for the complex, the chang-
ing, and the indeterminate. Paper presented at the 20th National ACM Conference, Cleveland,
Ohio.
Ong, W. (1982). Orality and literacy. London, UK: Methuen.
12 IN T E R M E D I A L I T Y

Paech, J., & Schröter, J. (Eds.). (2007). Intermedialität—Analog /Digital: Theorien, Methoden,
Analysen [Intermediality—analog/digital: Theories, methods, analyses]. Paderborn, Germany:
Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
Weiser, M. (1991). The computer for the twenty-first century. Scientific American, 265(3), 94–104.

Klaus Bruhn Jensen is professor in the Department of Media, Cognition, and Com-
munication at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and head of its Center for
Communication and Computing. Jensen is a Life Member for Service of the Associa-
tion of Internet Researchers and a fellow of the International Communicology Institute.
His research has addressed a range of topics in the theory, methodology, and empiri-
cal study of media and communication. A special focus of his work has been the users’
perspectives on media, as examined through a combination of qualitative and quan-
titative methodologies. He publishes widely in academic books and journals and has
presented his work around the world through conferences and invited lectures. He is
the editor of several reference works, including A Handbook of Media and Communica-
tion Research, now in its second edition, and he served as area editor for communication
theory and philosophy for The International Encyclopedia of Communication. Current
projects include cross-cultural studies of changing patterns of media use in the global
digital media environment and a volume on communication and justice.