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An update of my musings on transcoding metaphors,  submitted to SPIEL.
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Transcoding metaphors after the mediatic turn

Hegel once wrote, rather regretful: ?The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk? (Hegel 1820). With this metaphor he indicated that philosophy understands phenomena only at the end of the day, when things have already passed. Wisdom always comes by hindsight, but at that moment the phenomenon at stake might be gone already. Hegel's winged words are still up to date. Thus, when philosophers and media scholars proclaim a mediatic or a medial turn, and start building conceptual frameworks, disciplines, and research programs around (New) Media Philosophy (Rodowick 2001, M?nker e.a. 2003, Sandbothe 2005), we could have a gut feeling that this media thing might be already behind us.
And indeed, right at the moment scholars start thinking about what media are, what they do, how they constitute what we conceive as reality and truth, and what this implies for ethics, politics, education and culture at large, media seem to be gone. Or at least they are on the move. Contemporary media seem to have lost their stable ontology as apparatus, they can no longer be located in particular carriers, devices, modalities or institutions. They seem to be ubiquitous, everywhere and nowhere. They have become floating signifiers, ready to embark on any instance of articulation or communication, ready to mediate anything at hand. And, as usual in philosophy, with the wisdom of hindsight, we realize retrospectively that after all no medium ? be it print, film, or television ? ever had a stable ontology.
What do we have then? A minimum definition would be: we have processes instead of ?things? ? mediations instead of media.

Complete text: Transcoding metaphors after the mediatic turn