Media rarely die: five theses reframe how communication technologies evolve

When a new medium arrives, the old one rarely dies. Radio survived television, print survived the web, and the telegraph lives on in the clipped writing style of text messages. That observation sits at the heart of a new open-access article by Carlos A. Scolari, published in the journal Communication and Change on 14 August 2026, which sets out five theses on what the author calls Media Evolution and, in doing so, answers a pointed critique of the framework.

The article is conceived as a direct response to a 2025 paper by Otávio Daros, titled “Media History vs. Media Change: Ahistoricism, Technological Determinism, and Other Problems,” which appeared in the inaugural issue of the same journal. Daros argued that the growing prominence of concepts such as media change and media evolution does not represent an updated version of media history but rather a theoretical shift that risks marginalizing historical research. He diagnosed a “present-centredness” in media and communication research, a fascination with the new and the ephemeral, reinforced by structural changes in universities where traditional chairs in Communication or Media History are being rebranded as laboratories or divisions focused on Media Change and Innovation. In his view, fashionable new concepts imply a devaluation of historiographical work, replacing the documentation of socio-historical actors and institutions with the theorization of media as technology based on illustrative examples, a nod to technological determinism in which almost everything is presented as revolutionary.

Scolari, who has developed the evolutionary approach in earlier work including the 2023 book On the Evolution of Media, rejects the charge that the framework abandons empirical grounding. He points out that the third part of that book, titled “A Methodological Kit for Media Evolution,” devotes more than thirty pages to qualitative and quantitative approaches. On the quantitative side, he highlights longitudinal statistical analysis to trace diffusion curves, identify life cycle phases, and identify media niches, as Dimmick did in 2003. Computational approaches inspired by distant reading and cultural analytics can expand the toolkit further, while the application of digital technologies to historical newspapers is changing the research landscape. Systematic bibliometric techniques reconstruct the evolution of academic concepts through citation and publication analysis. These quantitative tools are complemented by traditional historical methods such as the examination of institutional records, trade publications, regulatory documents, and press archives, along with media archaeology’s genealogical depth and comparative case studies that identify processes of remediation, hybridization, and adaptation.

The first of the five theses holds that Media Evolution complements rather than replaces Media History and Media Archaeology. The three fields share an interest in past communication experiences but differ in scale, objectives, and methodological orientation. Media History traditionally reconstructs the development of communication media through empirically grounded studies based on archives, institutional records, and historical documents, often focusing on a single medium or national setting. Media Archaeology investigates forgotten, alternative, or suppressed media devices, uncovering discontinuities, dead ends, and experimental artefacts that challenge teleological accounts of media progress. Media Evolution seeks to integrate insights from both traditions while providing a systemic, long-term theoretical framework, drawing on evolutionary theory, cultural evolution, the history of science and technology, and media ecology. It relies on the empirical material generated by Media History to identify broader patterns and dynamics across time.

The second thesis reformulates a principle formulated by Marshall McLuhan in the early 1960s: the content of a new medium is an old medium. No medium emerges in a cultural vacuum. Writing incorporates speech, print incorporates writing, photography reworks painting, cinema draws on photography and theatre, television assimilates cinema and radio, and digital media remediate them all. The article offers a concrete example: when newspapers launched their online editions in the second half of the 1990s, they largely replicated the structures, sections, publication rhythms, and business models of the printed press, reproducing a 24-hour periodicity and relying on familiar advertising formats such as the sale of small rectangular spaces later standardized as banners. It took time for newspapers to understand the specific dynamics of the web, to produce and update content continuously throughout the day, and to adopt practices such as content personalization. The older medium does not become extinct in this process; it survives in transformed form within the new one, so media emergence is a process of incorporation, reconfiguration, and continuity through change rather than simple substitution.

The third thesis proposes that media evolution is a punctuated process. The framework challenges narratives that frame technological transformation as abrupt rupture or total revolution, proposing instead that media change typically unfolds through gradual processes of variation, selection, stabilization, and adaptation. Even moments perceived as disruptive, such as the rise of digital platforms or mobile communication, are rooted in earlier technical, institutional, and cultural developments. Yet the pace is not uniform. Historical evidence suggests periods of relative stability punctuated by phases of rapid innovation. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of new media technologies, including photography, the telephone, the phonograph, cinema, and wireless telegraphy, completing a broader industrial transformation initiated earlier in the century with steam-powered printing machines introduced at The Times in 1814 and electrical communication systems such as the telegraph of 1837. A comparable acceleration followed the emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, which the article describes less as a single medium than as an environment capable of generating and integrating multiple media forms, enabling platforms from Wikipedia and YouTube to Facebook and Twitter/X within a few decades. Such episodes resemble punctuated equilibrium, the model proposed by Eldredge and Gould in 1972, in which long periods of relative stability are interrupted by brief intervals of accelerated change.

The fourth thesis holds that media operate in relationship with other media. Media change should be analysed relationally rather than in isolation, treating the communicative environment as an ecosystem of interdependent media forms that interact through competition, cooperation, convergence, and remediation. The emergence of a new medium affects existing ones, triggering adaptation, redefinition, and functional differentiation. The evolution of cinema since its emergence in 1895, for example, cannot be understood without considering its shifting relations with theatre, television, comics, video games, and digital platforms; contemporary Hollywood blockbusters are deeply shaped by the narrative structures and visual conventions of superhero comics and the aesthetics associated with video games. The article notes that Media History itself has increasingly incorporated this “entangled media” perspective over the last decade, moving beyond isolated studies of the press, radio, or television to focus on the relations among them, an approach foregrounding cooperation and mutual transformation as well as rivalry.

The fifth thesis directly confronts decades of apocalyptic predictions about the extinction of media: the death of the book, the end of television, the disappearance of cinema, the collapse of blogs. Media Evolution observes that extinction is relatively uncommon. Instead, media tend to survive by adapting to new ecological conditions, specializing, shifting functions, or integrating into hybrid systems. Radio, cinema, and print did not disappear with the advent of television and digital media but redefined their roles within new configurations. The vinyl record constructed a niche within the media ecosystem, while the telegraph survived through the telegraphic writing styles of SMS and other forms of digital messaging. Certain components, conventions, or expressive forms may persist, be reactivated, or reappear within later media environments, a principle the author says underscores the resilience of media forms and emphasizes transformation rather than complete extinction.

On the contested question of technological determinism, the article argues that the media ecology tradition has consistently rejected simplistic causal interpretations. Walter Ong maintained that major developments in culture and consciousness are intimately related to transformations in communication while emphasizing that these relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish. Harold Innis, another figure often labelled a determinist, clarified that it would be presumptuous to suggest that the written or printed word has determined the course of civilizations. Scolari distinguishes two senses of determinism: as a force that shapes individual or social actions, and as the organizing thread of a scientific narrative. Applying this distinction, he suggests Innis’s work is more strongly characterized by narrative determinism, telling the history of humanity through the lens of communication media, whereas in McLuhan’s work technological determinism may appear more prominently as a dominant force. Media Evolution, he writes, rejects reductionist and technologically deterministic explanations in favour of a multidimensional understanding of media change, conceptualizing transformation as the outcome of multiple interacting variables including technological affordances, institutional frameworks, user practices, regulatory environments, and broader socio-cultural conditions.

The article concludes by presenting Media Evolution as an open research program with both significant potential and clear limitations. As a meta-theoretical framework, it risks remaining excessively abstract if not supported by detailed empirical research, and its reliance on concepts borrowed from evolutionary biology, such as adaptation, requires careful conceptual translation to avoid misleading analogies. Identifying measurable indicators for long-term processes such as emergence, dominance, or coevolution often requires longitudinal data, interdisciplinary tools, and extensive historical documentation. Future research may advance along four lines: quantitative modelling of media ecosystems, reconstruction of the genealogies of media forms and interfaces, analysis of coevolutionary dynamics among media, institutions, and social practices, and comparative study of punctuated media explosions. The author closes by thanking Daros for the stimulating discussion, arguing that it is precisely through this kind of open and critical dialogue that emerging frameworks can be refined, tested, and enriched.

Subject of Research: A theoretical response to a critique of media evolution as a framework for understanding long-term media change.

Article Title: Five theses on media evolution: continuing the conversation

Article References: Scolari, C. A. (2026). Five theses on media evolution: continuing the conversation. Communication and Change, 2(1), Article 17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44382-026-00038-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44382-026-00038-z

Keywords: media evolution, media history, media archaeology, media change, technological determinism, intermediality, media life cycle, punctuated equilibrium, remediation, media ecosystems, communication theory, new media