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Remediation is a media theory that media does not have a formula or specified way of being created or designed, but media’s existence is related to other media forms. The theory is in a book called Remediation: Understanding New Media that was written in 1999 by Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter. The work is a fundamentally comparative work beginning from the assumption that media do not possess autonomous formal or technical specificity, but that they exist only in relation to other media forms and practices. The book also argues that new media do not present a historical break or rupture with the past, but rather define their newness through the refashioning or re-mediating of older media practices and forms.

People

Bolter and Grusin

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin created the remediation theory. They wrote Remediation: Understanding New Media which is regarded as a founding text of the field of new media studies. They wrote it while working together at the Georgia Institute of Technology. They are both in the School of Literature, Media, and Communcation. There is a range of ways that designers can remediate mediums. ^[1] On one end of the spectrum, a creator borrows everything from the first medium and tranfers it to the second. For example, a movie about a Jane Austen novel that are faithful to the novel are adaptations that are trying to recreate the feelings that a reader has while reading the novel. It a transfer from one medium to the next, and the differences are caused by remediation. Another type of remediation is when the new media is trying to get away from the old media with having only a shadow of the old media be present, because it is impossible to completely eliminate the ideas of old media. It is like trying to build a house without the foundation. A third type of remediation on this scale is when the new media tries to absorb the old, but the new relies so much on the impressions of the old. For example, animated movies use computer graphics to make the animations look life-like.

• "All mediation is remediation because each act of mediation depends upon other acts of mediation."
• "Remediation is the mediation of reality because media themselves are real and because the experience of media is the subject of remediation."

Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan was a philosopher of communication theory, and his work was the foundation for theories like remediation. He lived from July 21, 1911 to December 31, 1980. He was born in Canada, and he studied English at the University of Manitoba and Cambridge. He created a lot of terms for media theory, including the Medium is the Message. His work influenced the media in his lifetime, but he has influenced modern day ideas about media even more. He would often tell people that disagreed with him that they knew nothing of his work.

Ideas Behind Remediation

Hypermedia and Immediacy

There is a co-dependent relationship between hypermedia and immediacy. In the Bolter and Grusin article, one of the ideas is that “the desire for immediacy leads to a process of appropriation and critique by which digital media reshape or ‘remediate’ one another and their analog predecessors such as film, television, and photography.” ^[2] The idea that immediacy is the catalyst for the reshaping of digital media, but the desire for immediacy comes from the current form of medium. Immediacy is remediated when people crave for immersion into the medium. The closer the medium is to generating reality, the more content users are. Hypermedia is a mix of a lot of forms of media in order to affect more than one sense or to expand within that sense to create a reaction. Immediacy is created when you feel connected to what is going on through your senses, because you feel like you are present.

Inventing the Medium

Image:Inventing the Medium cover.jpeg Janet Murray defines remediation as the phenomenon of reproducing the conventions or content or both of one medium in another. ^[3] New media is always influenced by the old forms of media, and in return, the new media has an influence on old media. Murray presents some of the issues with remediation in our society. The first issue is that designers are not satisfied with simply repeating the old format in the newest digital form. That is a weak remediation: “We cannot be satisfied with just reproducing be satisfied with just reproducing older information formats in digital form, settling for mere remediation of the textbook, the lecture, the broadcast TV show, the paper newspaper.” Designers create new media through thinking about the user. They think about what they would want to change with the current forms of media and what they want to bring over into the next form of media. The second issue is about boundaries of technology and of the projects themselves, and this leads to taking smaller steps in order to develop a future and more drastically different version. ^[4] A designer might have good ideas for ways to remediate information, but they can only design within the limits of technology, so they make multiple goals and plans in case technology moves in a different direction.

Media is the Message

Though it was written before the advent of digital media, "The Medium is the Message" (the first chapter of Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man", published in 1964) is a text that those of us who study digital media consider seminal and foundational. ^[5] In his discussion of the electric light (light is pure information – medium without message), McLuhan says the “content” of the medium is the activities that electric light allowed: “This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology” The electric light has no decision in what its content is. The content can be anything that someone is creative enough to imagine. This is how the web is. The web is just what holds and delivers the content. You can type in the right information, and the web will take you to the right address. The content is so vast for the web that search engines are required when researching a category that you need. The search engines have developed an algorithm that based on the key words you search will go through all the content to find either exactly what you are looking for or something similar. Even within search engines, vague key words will create pages upon pages of related content. This analog simplifies what the web as a medium affects people. The electric light is not really needed as much during the day, so it has a time when it is needed more, while the web has now become a constant necessity due to the content and its availability. The content being so vast means that there is always something that a user has not read or interacted with. There is always new content being created, and old content being stored or deleted. A medium is a process which content is received through, and there are mini processes within the medium that makes this happen. I liked how McLuhan described a medium as always having content of another medium, and I think this is true for the web. The web is a hub of multimedia experiences and expressions, such as: pictures, text, videos, and music. These are all mediums that people use to tell others information. This information varies and creates categories. For example, Instagram is home to so many different accounts of pictures that people have posted to express themselves. Within one account, the pictures can range from art to food to sharing in a memory with someone. The web is the medium for Instagram, and Instagram is the medium for the picture. The picture is a medium, and the content is self-expression. Self-expression is a medium for one individual.

Examples of Remediation

Film

When film was first invented, it was in the form of silent black and white films. For the moment that it was new, people were impressed with the realistic experience it gave audiences. I saw a video once of people in an audience watching a silent film where a moving train rushes towards the screen, and the people were scared and reacted to the scene. This reaction that is caused by the immediacy of media lead to new innovations in the forms of media, so now, there are 3 and 4-D films that cause the same reactions that happened with the train film. The difference is the level of immediacy and realism. 3-D movies have the images coming out of the screen at you using special glasses to create optical illusions. Some movies are made to be in 3-D, so they have the characters interact with the audience or have a lot of moments where things get toward to camera to make it look like it is being thrown into the audience. A 3-D movie only goes into the visual realism; however, 4-D movie experiences affect your sense of touch and smell along with sight and sound, and this creates more of the feeling that you are actually experiencing what is going on. 4-D movies are part of hypermedia, because it is affecting a majority of the senses.

Television

Television has expanded into being more realistic. HD, 3-D

Social Media

Social Media becomes more specialized from Facebook into Instagram and Twitter.

References

1. ↑ http://lmc.gatech.edu/~objork3/1101/fall07/remediation.pdf
2. ↑ http://lmc.gatech.edu/~objork3/1101/fall07/remediation.pdf
3. ↑ Janet H. Murray. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (Kindle Locations 4870-4872). Kindle Edition.
4. ↑ Janet H. Murray. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (Kindle Locations 617-622). Kindle Edition.
5. ↑ http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf