Remediation
From DigitalRhetoricCollaborative
Remediation is a media theory that explains how media does not have a formula or specified way of being created or designed. According to remediation, the media’s existence is related to other media forms. The theory is fundamentally comparative and assumes that media does not possess autonomous formal or technical specificity, but that it exists only in relation to other media forms and practices. The theory also argues that new media does not present a historical break or rupture with the past, but rather it defines their newness through the refashioning of the present media forms.
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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 Communication. 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 transfers 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. A movie based on a novel transfers 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 but still has evidence of past media, because it is impossible to completely eliminate the ideas of old media. It is like trying to build a house without the foundation. An example of this is how 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. These new forms of film are from the beginning of film, because the reality of the experience motivates the progression of film. 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.
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
Janet Murray who is the author of Inventing the Medium, 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 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.
The Medium 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, 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. This analog simplifies what the web as a medium affects people. 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 remediated from old content, because the desire for more interaction motivates remediation. The medium changes through this process.
References
- ↑ http://lmc.gatech.edu/~objork3/1101/fall07/remediation.pdf
- ↑ http://lmc.gatech.edu/~objork3/1101/fall07/remediation.pdf
- ↑ Janet H. Murray. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (Kindle Locations 4870-4872). Kindle Edition.
- ↑ Janet H. Murray. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (Kindle Locations 617-622). Kindle Edition.
- ↑ http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf
