Early internet scholarship understood the internet as a distinct new medium with its own autonomous dynamic. Recent developments have occasioned a more nuanced perception of the internet as media: while the internet does have a number of unique characteristics, it is simultaneously marked by various forms of interaction with other media.

The necessity of understanding of  mutual dependency and interaction of different media – what one might call the dynamics of ‘multimediality’ – is becoming increasingly evident, on the level of society as a whole as well as the structure of the media constitutive of the public sphere and in various forms of professional and private communicative practice.

The analysis of multimediality is of central importance in relation to both the conditions for the production and dissemination of knowledge and for the globalisation of communication. The multimediality perspective enables us to perceive parallels between the internet and older media, between national and international media organisations.

The interaction of different media constitutive of multimediality can be understood both as the internet’s cooptation/absorption of other media and as a communicative dialectic between different media and definitions of content.

CFI is presently working with both models of multimediality in projects on digital radio culture; the internet’s significance as a news media in relation to other media; the internet and other media as platforms for intermedial concepts among young people; the prioritization of the internet by major media concerns; and a theoretical project to refine the concept of multimediality itself.