Jay David Bolter, Richard Grusin,
Remediation -- Understanding New Media,

MIT Press 2000

(re) mediation -- forces at work

This is not like TV, only better -- says lenny Nero in Strange days

p. 48: Arthur C. Clarke has claimed that: Virtual Reality won't merely replace TV. It will eat it alive.

... he is right in the sens that virtual reality remediates televisn (and film) by the strategy of incorporation. This strategy does not mean that virtualreality can obliterate the earlier visualpoint-of-view technologies, rather it ensures that these technologies remain as least as reference points by which the immediacy of virtual reality is measured.

Paradoxically, then, remediation is as important for the logic of transparency as it is for hypermediacy.

synonyms: remediate, refashion, borrow, reform

immediacy

hypermediacy

authenticity -- immediacy + hypermediacy

P. 130: This image reveals again the double logic of remediation by representing the desire for immediacy in the shape of a film cannister and roll, the image insists on the reality of the media as objects in the world.

P. 145: ... virtualreality and its first person perspective can consitute an aesthetic experience.

p. 224: Convergence is the mutual remediation of at least three important technologies -- telephone, televison and computer -- each of which is a hybrid of technical, social and economic practice, and each of which offers its own path to immediacy.

The telephone offers the immediacy of voice or the interchange of voices in real-time.

Television is a point-of-view technology that promises immediacy through its insistent real-time monitoring of the world.

The computer's promise of immediacy comes through the combination of three-dimensional graphics, automatic (programmed) action, and an interactivity that television can not match.

As they come together, each of these is trying to absorb the others and promote its own version of immediacy.

p. 225: In the claim that new media should not be merely archival but immersive, the rhetoric of virtual reality finally enters in, with its promise of the immediacy of experience through transparency.

p. 226: The promise of push-pull media is to marry the programming experience of television with two key yearnings:

navigating information and experience
and connecting to other people.

new media


... what is in fact new is the particular way in which each innovation rearranges and reconstitutes the meaning of earlier elements.

What is new about media is therefore also old and familiar: that they promise the new by remediating what has gone before.

The true novelty would be a new medium that did not refer to the other media at all.

For our culture, such mediation without remediation seems to be impossible.