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To the logosphere would correspond the era of idols in the broadest sense (from the Greek eidolon, image). It extends from the invention of writitng to that of printing. To the graphosphere, the era of art, which extends from the time of the printing press to that of color television (relevant differently, as we shall see, from photography or film). To the videosphere , the era of the visual (according to the term proposed by Serge Daney). We are there.
Each of these areas delineates an environment of life and thought with strong internal connections, an ecosystem of vision and thus a certain horizon of visual expectation (which does not expect the same thing from a Pantocrator, a self-portrait, and a short video spot). We have already seen (in Cours de médiologie générale) how no mediasphere entirely supplants the other and how they become superimposed upon and interwoven with one another. These dominances are relayed by successive hegemonies; and rather than as clean breaks, their borders ought to be conceptualized in the old way, as they were before the existence of nation-states: buffer zones, fringe areas of contact, broad chronological stages that yesterday embraced centuries and today only decades. Just as the innovation of printing did not erase from our culture medieval proverbs and common dicta, those mnemonic devices proper to oral societies, television does not prevent us from going to the Louvre (quite the contrary). Nor is this museum's department of Egyptian antiquities closed off to eyes trained by the movie screen. It is worth repeating that nothing occurs after the cesura that could not already be found before it. If this were not the case, developments on either side could not be linked together, each germinating within its predecessor..."