Remediation, Intro and Chapter 1 -- Bolter & Grusin

Article here.

I struggled a bit with terminology in this article, specifically remediation, immediacy and hypermediacy. I will attempt to work my way through it...

The term remediation in the book's glossary:

“Defined by Paul Levenson as the ‘anthropotropic’ process by which new media technologies improve upon or remedy prior technologies. We define the term differently, using it to mean the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms.”

Hmm...how about a specific example on page 44:

“Hypermedia CD-ROMs and windowed applications replace one medium with another all the time, confronting the user with the problem of multiple representation and challenging her to consider why one medium might offer a more appropriate representation than another. In doing so, they are performing what we characterize as acts of remediation.”

So remediation is the representation of one medium in another. So what does this mean in the realm of new media? What is "new" about "new media" comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashions itself to answer the challenge of new media (15). Which leads us to...

Old media vs. new media

Popular opinion has been that new digital technologies (internet, computer games, etc.) separate themselves from old media in order to transcend and evolve the limitations of old media. However, Bolter and Grusin contend that new media achieves such significance and growth because they refashion old media -- this is what they call remediation. New media aren't the first to do this: photography remediated painting, film remediate stage productions, television remediated film and radio.

There is a lot to discuss in this new media vs. old media game, but I'm interested in how immediacy and hypermediacy come into play.

Immediacy vs. Hypermediacy

Immediacy: immediate awareness of an occurrence with the lack of an intervening/mediating agency. Where representation "is the thing itself" (a little help here)

Hypermediacy: "style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium" (Bolter and Grusin, 272). Our desire for immediacy but transparent immediacy. A good example from here: "In Psycho, when we see an extreme close-up of Norman Bates's eye as he watches Marion Crane through the peephole, then find ourselves looking through it ourselves, Hitchcock foregrounds the act of seeing, implicating the viewer in the voyeurism that is at the root of Norman's (and our?) psychosis. Hitchcock's is an act of hypermediacy."

Professor Stephen Dobson offers a very useful chart to explain immediacy vs. hypermediacy:

My immediacy example: my heart is racing and my palms are sweating while watching a scary movie. This is a synthesized experience of reality -- there are actors and scenery but my emotions from the experience are very real. I feel like I'm there.

My hypermediacy example: I'm marveling at a Pixar movie -- I can't believe how real it looks. I identify that a medium is present and I am having this experience because of the qualities of the medium. I am reminder that the sense of "reality" I'm experiencing is mediated.