Most discussions on mediality and intermediality take their point of departure as contemporary digital media, social media included. Hence, earlier periods in cultural history are often regarded as simple forerunners for the highly complex situation in today’s globalized media culture based on digital technologies. It is true that electronic media technology and its social effects now have reached an unprecedented and accelerated technological complexity. However, this perspective tends to ignore the fact that from ancient times up to the late nineteenth century, a wealth of media innovations exercised an impact in their contemporary cultures and societies; innovations that equal the influence of digital media today: the introduction of writing, book printing, the printed press and its technologies, visual reproduction technologies, the telegraph, photography, film, the telephone and other innovations in the media world. The focus of this article is a few specific media innovations and the radical changes they generated over the last few hundred years in literature and art as well as in their cultural and societal contexts. Such innovations are steps in the long process that leads to recent media developments and their influence on experiences, knowledge, ideologies and human self-understanding.

大多数关于媒体性和中介性的讨论都以当代数字媒体（包括社交媒体）为出发点。因此，文化史上的早期阶段通常被认为是当今基于数字技术的全球化媒体文化中高度复杂的情况的简单先驱。确实，电子媒体技术及其社会影响现在已经达到了前所未有的、加速的技术复杂性。然而，这种观点往往忽视了这样一个事实：从古代到十九世纪末，大量的媒体创新对其当代文化和社会产生了影响；与当今数字媒体的影响力相媲美的创新：书写、书籍印刷、印刷机及其技术、视觉复制技术、电报、摄影、电影、电话和媒体世界的其他创新。本文的重点是一些具体的媒体创新以及它们在过去数百年中在文学和艺术及其文化和社会背景中产生的根本性变化。这些创新是导致最近媒体发展及其对经验、知识、意识形态和人类自我理解的影响的漫长过程中的步骤。