The emergence phase of a new media is characterized by the simulation of the hegemonic form of communication. As McLuhan wrote, “”the content of any medium is always another medium.”” History offers innumerable examples of this mimicking process. For example, Gutenberg’s mechanically reproduced books tried to respect, to the smallest detail, the manuscript books handwritten by medieval copyists. The prototypographers copied the characters, the design format, the abbreviation system, and the distribution of the text on the page. In the initial period, the printers did more than innovate; they pushed the simulation to the limit. It was unthinkable for the typographers to have any other attitude but to imitate. How could they imagine books that were different from the codex manuscript model, which for over a millennium was the main support for writing in the West? From the printers’ point of view, the perfect reproduction of the manuscript had, on one hand, an enormous aesthetic value that gave prestige to their work and, on the other hand, guaranteed commercial success in a market made up of readers who were used to texts produced by copyists. Unlike the previous great transformation – the change from the papyrus roll to codex – the invention of the printing press did not lead to a revolution in the book interface but rather was the beginning of a slow evolution. Until the middle of the 16th century, the codex and the printed book formed part of the same history; they were different aspects of the same production process and cultural diffusion. The simulation process occurs each time a new communication technology merges in the media ecology, from the daguerreotype to the radio or the World Wide Web.

The first daguerreotype of the 19th century emulated the style and content of hand-painted works. A quick virtual glance at the archives of the Daguerreian Society is enough to discover portraits, postmortem images, and bucolic scenes that, until then, had been the patrimony of the easel painting. In the case of the radio, in addition to creating its own scripts, the radio drama adapted all kinds of traditional theater plays and literary works, from comedies by Moliere to The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. As noted, during its emergence in the 1990s, the World Wide Web resorted to simulating media that, at that time, occupied a hegemonic position. The first online newspapers reproduced the content, the way of organizing the text, and the update rate of the printed versions in the same way that banners imitated the format and commercialization mode (depending on their surface, location, and readers/users) of printed newspaper publicity. Many years needed to pass before the online press started to find and develop the distinctive traits that currently characterize it: updating in real time, multimedia content, and interactivity.

Simulation can range from an intersemiotic translation of the content of one medium to another medium to mimicking the interaction forms. In the first case, we could talk of a textual productive consumption during the production process – that is, the new medium feeds off the texts of an old medium. In the second case, we are faced with the process of simulating all the effects; a new medium attempts to use its own resources to do something that the old medium already does.

^{Adapted from Media Evolution: Emergence, Domination, Survival, and Extinction in the Media Ecology by Carlos Scolari, 2013}
.

Find an error? Take a screenshot, email it to us at error@mytestingsolution.com, and we’ll send you $3!