Is it related somehow to recursion?
TL;DR: “beyond”.
NTL;R (not too long, reading):
First you have an Ancient Greek word, ⟨μετά⟩ metá “between, along with, besides, following, afterwards”. It’s a messy word, given it works as a preposition and adverb and even prefix, and depending on the case of the following word you can tweak the meaning further.
Then you have Aristotle writing two collections of works, that were eventually called:
- ⟨Τὰ Φυσικά⟩ Tà Physiká “The Nature”, or “The Natural World”. Also called “Physics”.
- ⟨Μετὰ τὰ Φυσικά⟩ Metà tà Physiká “After The Nature”, or “After the Natural World”. Also called “Metaphysics”.
Whoever called the second book this way (not Aristotle himself, I think?) meant the book was supposed to be read after the first one, because it’s considerably more abstract than the first one. And it leans more into what we call today Philosophy, while the first one would be more of what we’d call Science.
Time goes by. People started interpreting “Metaphysics” as if it meant “Beyond Physics”, or “The Nature beyond Nature”, due to its content. And then they picked that prefix, and plopped it in other words to imply recursion, like:
- metagame - the game beyond the game. For example, you pick PvP battles on a game and build a competition out of it.
- metadata - the data beyond the data. For example, when and where a file was created.
- metatheatre - aspects of a theatrical play that highlight it’s a play (break its fourth wall).
- metalanguage - language being used to explain language. Like this whole comment.
- etc.
“The meta” is usually “the metagame”.
it means “about the thing itself”
breaking the 4th wall is meta
meta data is data about the data
metamorphosis is a change or “morph” about the change
yep. more things:
the “current meta” of a game is the currently winning stream of thought about how to play the game.
metacognition is thinking about how and why you think the way you do
Meta often means “one layer up,” e.g. “metaphysics” is the way of the world that our mundane world is embedded in. A reader might remark that the book Gödel Escher Bach is “pretty meta,” which might mean it breaks the 4th wall.
The opposite to meta is mesa. For instance, AI safety researchers sometimes talk about mesa-optimizers, meaning an optimizer which itself is optimised by another optimiser.
Facebook’s metaverse is apparently misnamed – seeing as it runs on computers which are in our own universe, it really ought to be called the mesaverse, and our physics are its metaphysics.
The Meta is a character in the hit internet series Red vs Blue.
Related, I always explained it as “narrative about,” as in a meta-narrative is about the narrative. Same difference as one layer up I suppose.
Is metanarrative the story of the story?
Something about grand metanarratives and postmodernism
…or the metanareative can be the structure of the story itself.
Here’s a few frequent ones (Kurt Vonnegut for more):
Someone ran into a set of problems and then solved them.
Some people met, overcame some stuff and then ended up together.
Things were bad and got better.
Things were bad and got worse.
A specific thing needed to be done and someone did it.
Yeah you could apply the word to a story-in-a-story like The Princess Bride, which has a narrative about a boy hearing another story. The meta-narrative would be the story about the boy.
You don’t need to get recursive with the layers of fiction though. If you imagine a long-running many-hundreds-of-episodes tv show, the show will likely be divided into a number of distinct arcs, perhaps season-by-season. Each arc will have its own narrative, its own story beats, its own themes; but all the arcs will be tied together by a metanarrative, a narrative encompassing the other narratives.
In games it usually means “the currently popular way to play”. Like everybody using more or less the same strategy because it gives easy wins.
This can also be used in things like “making YouTube videos” where the meta for a while now has been to make an exaggerated astonished expression in the thumbnail.
More generally meta is a thing about the thing. A book talking about itself is meta. Me referencing my own comment is meta. A post talking about Lemmy is meta.
Also:
I’m so meta, even this acronym.
Meta is used in many ways. In CS usually something in between. Source code, intermediate or meta code, binary code.
