MULTIMEEDIALISUS
Multimediality

Summary/Abstract: The semantic field of multimedia and multimediality has been moving from technical understanding towars cultural interpretation. Note that this natural conceptual traveling has taken place on two terminological fields. One of them is medium- bound and historically hybrid. This means that multimediality as a concept may but function as one of a bigger association, but it may also derive from multimedia as a metaconcept. The key concepts of this field are multimedia, hypermedia, intermedia and transmedia. The other field is historically more complex, centering on text as the most common entity enabling analysis of communicational processes in different media. Here the key concepts are multimedial text, transmedial text, hypermedial text and intermedial text. Textuality here is based on the idea that communication is impossible without metacommunication. As a result, culture can be described as an association of primary proto-texts and secondary metatexts. All those texts are complementary in culture. On the static level, a text is analysed by describing its inherent multimodality ensuing from the hierarchy of linguistic functions in communication; or, by focusing on the surface structure and analysing the mono- or multimediality of the text. In cultural memory, textuality has to do with remembering the texts as well as their intertextual relations and all their socio-cultural relations. The dynamic level of analysis is enabled by recognition that text dynamics and text mingling may happen in cultures. Both the visual and hidden intra- and intertextual relations form the basis for abstract text perception, i.e. for mental existence of texts in a culture. Mentality and its transmedial aspect an be analysed not only on individual and group level, but also on the level of cultural discourses and mediating mechanisms. Notably, the intertextual, interdiscursive, intermedial and intersemiotic mentalities are all different levels of one and the same cultural mechanism, while their hierarchy conditions the mentality bridging separate fields of a culture as well as uniting the culture as a whole. The state of a mental memory, in turn, depends on the semiotic memory experience, i.e. the co-effect and hierarchy of sign systems in the culture in question. How to bind the static and dynamic analysis into a holistic theory of culture is a live methodological issue. As a large share of modern culture in general is mediated – or medial – culture, media analysis is essential for understanding not only medial mechanisms, but all cultural mechanisms. Thus multimediality is an essential feature of culture, which needs a complex approach, including theoretical, empirical and, last but not least, educational analysis uniting the former two.

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