Media Borders in Our Minds

There are some recurring basic concepts in the humanities and social sciences that seem to be under perennial debate. They are constantly under attack for being ‘simplistic’ or criticised for being vague or ‘only metaphoric’ – suggesting that they don’t really point to anything as it really is. Yet, every time one of these concepts has been massacred, it soon comes back to life again like a Phoenix, the bird reborn from the ashes. I am thinking of concepts like ‘form vs. content’, ‘transfer’ and ‘border’. The form/content dichotomy is used in a number of contexts and it is often suggested that it is untenable because the two aspects are intertwined and cannot really be separated. In communication studies, the classic concept of transfer, suggesting that meaning is transferred among human minds in communication, is often miscredited because meaning is not ‘really’ moved from one person to another. In a number of research areas, the ideas about borders between, say, different cultures, different sexual identities or different media are questioned because it is fairly easy to demonstrate that the presumed borders are constantly crossed in various ways to the point where their existence can be questioned.

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Of course, this critique is justified, necessary and productive. Nevertheless, it will never be possible to abandon these criticised concepts. I don’t think that their extraordinary longevity is primarily a sign of people’s inability to face a complex reality and an inclination to fall back on easy solutions – that is, simplistic concepts – even though the concepts are indeed sometimes used in simpleminded ways. Instead, concepts insist on forming our thoughts because they correspond to certain basic perceptual inclinations and fulfil vital cognitive needs. Because of our embodied minds, deeply formed by our experiences of a material world where things are definitely inside and outside of each other, where objects and bodies are clearly constantly transferred in space, and where we perceive palpable borders between various areas and materials, we simply cannot avoid thinking in terms of form/content, transfer and borders. Perceiving our own body in the world, we perceive it as a form containing internal substance and sensations, moving around in space and encountering borders of all sorts. And cognition does not appear out of nothing, but it is built on, and evolves from, such perceptions.

Therefore, spatial thinking is vital for cognition in general, including the conceptualization of media and media interrelations. Although sometimes misleading, there is no way of getting rid of ideas about form and content in media, transfer of meaning among minds or among different media, or borders between media. I’d rather argue that these concepts are indispensable for any effort to describe and interpret media and their interrelations. Used in considered ways, they help us to conceptualize complex phenomena. A concept such as media borders is not ‘only metaphoric’, understood as a substitute for something more real; it is ‘necessarily metaphoric’, because we cannot escape the deep and inherent similarity between the outer world and our cognitive spaces.