Passages across Thresholds: Into the Borderlands of Mediation

Concepts of multimodality, intermediality and intertextuality are here put in a wider cultural context of boundaries and transgressions. Earlier concepts of passages and thresholds may enrich today’s understanding of recent mixtures and flows across borders within contemporary digital media culture. A trace from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project is followed through the borderlands of a contemporary shopping centre in order to approach late modern thinking of flows across borders in media culture and cultural studies, where with contextualising, dialogic and critical interpretation are crucial. The combination of ‘multi’ and ‘inter’ stresses plurality and interrelations rather than monolithic and essentialist reductions. A first section presents sociological, anthropological and philosophical ideas of passages and borderlands. The second section outlines main kinds of media passages through real and virtual spaces. The third section discusses the interrelations between multi- and inter-concepts that are today crucial for cultural theory, suggesting some ways to understand their mutual connections.The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in: Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, (8), 4, 89-106, 2002.Johan Fornäs, Passages across Thresholds: Into the Borderlands of Mediation.http://convergence.beds.ac.uk/issues/volumeeight/numberfour. by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. http://www.sagepub.com