Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Bolter and Grusin do a fine job of explaining remediation in the technical sense. To be honest, before I came to WSU, I only considered the term “remediation” as a “euphemism for the task of bringing lagging students up to an expected level of performance” (p.59), which is much different than Bolter and Grusin’s explanation of remediation as the evolution of media as they reshape and refashion themselves through technological advancements and as a result of societal and cultural forces. I find the connection between these two definitions quite fascinating. Both definitions indicate a sense of improvement with the change in the medium (print, technological, HUMAN) but the “traditional” definition tends to focus on more of a deficit model of understanding while the Bolter and Grusin definition does not imply that there was anything “wrong” with the previous medium. In fact, the authors point out that there are a number of instances in which remediation changes a medium only to bring it back nearly full circle to its roots.
In fact, the authors point out that no media is in isolation to other media. They explain that “no medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces” (p.15). Lanham responds to this idea of connectivity when he explains that the common fear of print media becoming obsolete is unfounded. For Lanham, and for Bolter and Grusin, print media will not disappear but it will become remediated. Our current obsession with the physicality of traditional books is now giving way to remediated books that sort of “feel” like traditional books (iPad, Kindle, Nook) but that are entirely digital.
Bolter and Grusin explain that remediation takes place through hypermediacy, when media (and the authors of texts within these media) purposely make the viewer/reader very aware of the medium and through transparent immediacy. For many of us, hypermediacy isn’t necessarily a positive thing. I am, for instance, very aware of the fact that I am reading Pride and Prejudice on a machine rather than on my beloved paper book but, as Bolter and Grusin point out, hypermediacy can and SHOULD occasionally be purposeful when rhetorically appropriate. I think Lanham would disagree here (based only on his article that we read earlier anyway) since he prefers that any digital medium should be fluid and unobtrusive and that “it is good only when you don’t notice it” (Lanham, p.277); this is much like Bolter and Grusin’s transparent immediacy.
Both Bolter and Grusin and Richard Lanham do, though, focus most of their discussion on the impact of this remediation on the reader. Lanham’s “responsive reader” (Lanham, p.268) is very similar to Bolter and Grusin’s focus on viewer centered media. In both cases, the ubiquitous nature of technology and various media results in a “hyperconsciousness” (Bolter and Grusin, p.38) of users and this awareness allows us to better understand the interconnectedness of various media since “mediation without remediation seems to be impossible” (Bolter and Grusin, p.271).
I agree that, prior to reading Bolter and Grusin,I thought that remediation only held the negative connotation of "getting caught up" in some deficiency. I further agree that I like the new definition much better! The remediation of the term remediation (hehe) also reminds me of another term discussed in Susan Ross's digital diversity class, which I am observing this semester: evolutionary revolution. Evolutionary revolution refers to the gradual trickling in of new media or technologies, to the point where we adapt to them seemlessly and perhaps even blindly, and then we look back ten years later and think "how in the heck did we get from point A to B?" I think evolutionary revolution happens a lot more in day to day life, and could be something like saving your credit card information online, whereas before you may have been suspicious of ATMs (example from Ross's class). However, I think being educators and practitioners of new media implementation, we resist evolutionary revolution, because we're used to being critical rather than following trends.
ReplyDeleteGood point about the Kindle, although at least in my personal experience this is a medium that vacillates a lot between "transparent" and "hypermediated". When I'm reading a work of fiction for pleasure, I hardly see any difference between the Kindle or the printed text...the duplication is so precise that after the initial differences of texture wear off I'm using the exact same process to read. However, if I'm reading something scholarly, or if I want to take notes, I become incredibly conscious of the medium. There's just something about typing out my notes as opposed to jotting them on a paper or in the margins that feels so much more final. Which is strange, considering that I can edit kindle notes much more easily than I could with pen on paper. Somehow the act of engaging with the text makes me more aware of the medium when I'm working with an electronic format than it would for print. I wonder if this is strictly because of familiarity?
ReplyDeleteI think there's a big theory/practice issue here. B&G, Lanham and everyone else are right to say print won't disappear and that all these media just inform and reproduce each other. But, those're theorists out there, folks like us who're suppose to "[be] critical rather than [follow] trends" like Elizabeth said. In real life, do these media really mutually inform each other? Maybe that was my question running throughout Remediation, these simple ideas are being complicated and explained in ways that I don't think the majority of users really think about. Do we have to be conscious of the remediation to get anything out of it? (In other words: do our students catch what's going on when we use a book and it's film version as course texts? Do they catch shifts in meaning when they read "Hills like White Elephants" in pdf, from a photocopy, out of a book or in hypertext? http://www.has.vcu.edu/eng/webtext/hills/hills.htm)
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