Immediacy, remediation, mediation

In Remediation, J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin question the implications of the new digital age and specifically our immediacy that has resulted from it. They first set out to convince the audience that perpetual immediacy is real and though there are glitches in our media still, the age of hypermedia and complete submersion in visual reality is here.

My main question to Bolter and Grusin is: Why does it matter? They take so much time explaining how computer graphics have taken over and can transport their audience into any reality they choose and how hypermediacy is so popular, but what are they trying to prove? What is remediation?

In quoting Marshall McLuhan, Bolter and Grusin attack the idea that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium,” meaning that every piece of rhetoric is possibly just a “complex form of borrowing” (338). They also present this idea that a new medium can absorb an old medium entirely, for example video games stemming from film. It is here that Bolter and Grusin start to answer the question: “why does it matter,” that remediation is necessary for the logic of immediacy as it is for hypermediacy.

In the sections dealing with hypermediacy, I kept imagining Daniel’s Public Secrets from last week, involving audio, visual, graphic images and text. Each point involving mediation can be seen in his text. Remediation as the mediation of mediation merely deals with how texts are constantly commenting on and impacting one another. Remediation as the inseparability of mediation and reality argues that each part of media, whether its been through remediation of not is real. And lastly, Remediation as reform is the idea the media is rehabilitated to a better state though remediation, for example how Daniel’s original piece of rhetoric may have been a simple website with typed text, it was repurposed to include audio clips and moving images to capture the audience even better (340).

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. “Remediation.” Configurations 4.3 (1996): 311-358.

Available at < http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/toc/con4.3.html. >