Bolter and Grusin: Remediation--Understanding New Media

This reading discusses the emergence of new media in the late 1990's. It describes the appreciation for remediation, due to the rapidly growing area of digital media along with the swift moving reaction by old/traditional media. The authors explain that new media has refashioned itself from traditional media, and argue that older media like radio and television did the same thing during their emergence. They provide the example of the CNN website and discuss the similarities of the site and television network. The website adopts many familiar applications that the network offers; therefore the website has refashioned itself from the televised newscasts.

The authors discuss new technologies such as the Internet, virtual reality, computer games, and digital photography and explain that these technologies dictate immediacy which leaves the user detached from the medium itself and become completely absorbed in the medium’s representation. For example, a user playing a computer game knows that this is not reality, but they become engrossed in the program losing touch with reality. This is known as hypermediacy. The reading also relates hypermediacy back to the Baroque era by explaining the "Wunderkammer." This object provides a multiplicity of forms like the wood, stone, or metal and the religious relics, animal remains, etc. and explain that it is an ancestor of today's sophisticated software.

The reading concludes with the statement: "Digital media can never reach this state of transcendence, but will instead function in a constant dialectic with earlier media, precisely as each earlier medium functioned when it was introduced..." In the late 90's I probably would have agreed with this statement, but today digital media has a life of its own and does not depend on earlier media. I do believe that any new medium may have evolved from an older media, but today's digital media does not need to be in constant dialectic with its older counterparts. If anything, the older media must be in constant dialectic with new media in order to stay relevant.