Go East young 'man': seek wisdom from Laozi and Buddha on how to metatheorize mediatization

This essay argues the case for developing a more acceptable metatheory that scholars could use as a framework to hypothesize the non-linear development of global mediatization, a term that European researchers coined at the turn of the century. We can extract the rudiments of such a theory from the Buddhist doctrine of dependent co-arising (Paticca Samuppada), which explicates the bhavacakra (the wheel of becoming) and samsara (cyclic existence) in terms of 12 interdependent, interconnected, and interactive nidanas (underlying links). The Buddhist approach, combined with the Daoist Yijing paradigm and Miller's living systems theory, could help build a metatheory of global mediatization. This paper also suggests that mediatization scholars could collaborate with sociocybernetic scholars, who are working on a new systems approach, which focuses on interaction between living systems and their environment. Sociocybernetic theories no longer generate hypotheses about bivariate distributions. Concurrently, sociologists themselves have been experimenting with artificial societies to study social emergence using multiagent systems.