The boundless spaces of expanded multimedia

Back in 1970 Gene Youngblood published his book “Expanded Cinema”, undoubtedly one of the major milestones in the world of media theory. In the book he argues that during the late 1960 cinema and the whole complex of audiovisual media, reached a tipping point when the boundaries of the world of moving images broke down and a new visual reality emerged. That was the time when the videosphere appeared and the intermedia where born. Today, forty years later, we see another, somewhat similar event. The intermedia, which in the meantime evolved in multimedia, reached another “Seldon crisis point”, and we can witness how the whole complex of multimedia creation, processing, distribution and consumption is undergoing a radical change. That change shall profoundly modify the world of mass media communications. The boundaries that until now separated different mass media are becoming progressively blurred and in a not so distant future they might completely disappear creating thus just one big media industry. In a surrogate social environment lonely media consumers will exchange interaction for communication and try to escape the harsh reality by immersing themselves in infinite virtual worlds of the boundless expanded multimedia.