Media structure our access to the world, they organize our forms of communication, and they play a significant role in the configuration of knowledge. This applies not only to contemporary technical mass media but also to historical media and their respective specifications, modalities and values. As such, all media are characterized by an underlying dynamic that requires adjustments and reformatting in the media landscape. Inherent to these adjustments is a potential for conflict since they are accompanied by epistemic, social or aesthetic transformations. Media rarely disappear. Instead, they adapt to their environments and seek new areas of influence and impact. They generate, more significantly, a considerable potential for irritation that we can find inscribed in a variety of communication formats, media aesthetics, and social dimensions. Moreover, media do not act in isolation. They operate in close connection with technological innovations and social changes; frequently, they also prompt them. In this sense, they display a paradoxical dual function: media effect change, and, at the same time, they become subject to it.

Based on these considerations, this book series departs from rigid single-media ontologies which are unable to adequately capture the complex intricacies of current and historical media dynamics as they incline towards isolating and thwarting individual media. To facilitate an interdisciplinary interconnection of research perspectives, we require a theoretical and methodological capturing of complex dynamics. Such dynamics' often contradictory diversity reveals ruptures and irritations that are frequently irreconcilable. At the same time, we may find synergies and interferences we should be keen to expose.

The specific focus on media dynamics presented here opens up a new analytical space for describing and interrogating those dynamic interactions that arise from the interplay between historical and contemporary media. Of particular interest are historical foundations of media dynamics as well as current developments in AI which widely herald another media revolution while posing entirely new questions about media and their dynamics.

Recognizing oscillations between dramatic consequences and innovative propulsions of media dynamics, which materialise in technologies, changing communication structures as well as in political and social upheavals, the series invites cross-cultural or comparative as well as multi-disciplinary approaches and methodologies.