Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.
In Remediation, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin use a wide range of examples to provide a historical and theoretical overview of the process of remediation in the advent and implementation of new technologies and new media in society.
The book is divided into three segments: “Theory, Media, and Self.” The first provides a theoretical foundation for the principles of remediation and includes a historical perspective with examples as well as key terms and definitions. Section II takes an in depth look at the various modes of communication available through multiple media ranging from computer games, digital photography and television to the World Wide Web and “Ubiquitous Computing.” In the third segment, Bolter and Grusin take on the ideological, theoretical and social implications posed by “The Remediated Self,” “The Virtual Self,” and “The Networked Self.”
Theoretically speaking, there are several essential terms Bolter and Grusin define and expound upon in this text and they are as follows: Immediacy, Remediation, Mediation, and Hypermediacy. It is crucial to understand each of these terms in order to fully comprehend the future of media studies. Of central importance to this text and the theories presented is the revolutionary advent of linear perspective in the Renaissance.
According to the authors, this development in the way we use media and see the world has dominated our Western views and demands of media for centuries. Since painters of the Renaissance developed and attempted to perfect the techniques of linear perspective, the audience has demanded a sense of immediacy in media. Immediacy is the idea that the viewer desires the medium to be transparent, or that the mode of representation should disappear entirely when viewing the subject. In other words, we want to forget that we are looking at a painting and become lost in the visual representation of the painting, to become part of the scene depicted, to get a realistic view of the content shown. We want a first-person view, to become immersed in the media and forget the mode. Bolter and Grusin use virtual reality technology as the ultimate example of answering the demand for immediacy; however, I find their expectations for virtual reality a bit unrealistic when considering how little has been done to expand on and improve the technology in the past decade.
If immediacy is the desire to forget or see through the medium, hypermediacy occurs when the medium incorporates multiple modes, and in so doing calls attention to the viewer’s desire for immediacy. For example, a website to a Caribbean tourist destination may have steel drums playing as a soundtrack, a slideshow of pictures of the beach and grounds, a video that can be played showing the adventures that can be booked through the concierge, all accompanied by text that you can read describing the amenities. We are acutely aware of the multimedia aspects of this site, all provided to give us a sense of actually being in this place, and yet the hypermediacy also reminds us how not there we really are. This is my own example, but I think it works.
Mediation is the incorporation of old media in the advent and production of new media. In this sense, all mediation is remediation. For example, an online newspaper will have elements of the printed version, but will also have interactive and multimedia elements that cannot be achieved in the traditional print mode. Remediation is the process by which new media encompasses, superimposes upon, and supersedes the modalities of the old media it seeks to overtake or replace. This is not to say that the old media will disappear, but it will take on new forms to adapt to the demands of the new technologies available to it. So, for example, if we are living in the “late age of print,” print will be mediated to include multimedia in the remediation process. Print is still valuable and needed in new media, but it takes on a different representation and a different vehicle of communication when it is incorporated into other modes.
The definitions and examples of these terms are perhaps the most valuable aspect of this text. While the second and third segments are useful in their specific dealings with the distinct types of media available, the theoretical basis for the analysis of new media that is provided in the first section is invaluable to my research into how multimedia texts are an extension of the writing process. While this book is already somewhat dated, the theoretical information provided is essential to my work.
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