glossary_remediation

Remediation is a neologism coined by Richard Grusin and Jay Bolter to describe various forms of technolgical intertextualization, meaning that various forms of technology (old and new) are made to mimic each other in order to accommodate the needs of their users.

Jay David Bolter states that “in the past two decades…computers have been recognized not only as writing technologies, but as media for popular entertainment and expression, which we are using to refashion visual as well as verbal communication,” and In 1999 Bolter & Grusin “examined the ways in which new visual media, such as computer graphics, virtual reality, and the World Wide Web, define themselves by borrowing from, paying homage to, critiquing, and refashioning their predecessors, principally television, flim, photography, and painting” (Writing Space, 24).

According to Katherine Hayles, “these processes are going on all around us, including computer screens being arranged to look like television screens, television screens with multiple windows made to look like computer screens, print books mimicking computers, computers being imaged to look like books. One term put forward to describe these complex relationships is Medial Ecology. The phrase suggests that the relationship between different media are as diverse and complex as those between dfferent organisms coexisting with-in the same ecotome, including mimicry, deception, cooperation, competition, parasitism, and hyperparasitism” (Writing Machines, 5).

“N. Katherine Hayles defines medial ecology as ‘the relationships between all the media interacting with one another in a given social, cultural, and temporal context.’ Important to this idea is the cycling of behaviors ebbing and flowing between the giant calculators of yesterday and the micro-computers of today, the ghosts of older technologies alive and well in the newer modes of discourse. In a less [exaggerated] example, this ghost presence is manifest every time we flip through a book in a non-linear fashion, incorporating hypertextual reading practices into traditional print material” (Kevin R. Hollo, “Monster Slang: The Metonymic Functions of Textual Archivation,” 1).

Bolter believes that “computer games remediate film by styling themselves as ‘interactive movies’; virtual reality remediates film as well as perspective painting; digital photography remediates the analog photograph. The World Wide Web absorbs and refashions almost every previous visual and textual medium, including television, film, radio, and print. Furthermore, older media can remediate newer ones within the same media economy. Today, the traditional cinema is attempting to maintain its status by employing computer graphics in conventional linear films. And television is making such extensive use of new media that TV screens often look like pages from the World Wide Web. Remediation is a characteristic process not only for contemporary media, but for all visual media at least since the Renaissance with its invention of linear-perspective painting. Each medium seems to follow this pattern of borrowing and refashioning other media, and rivalry as well as homage seems always to be at work” (Writing Space, 25).

I am inclined to believe that digitally interpellated humans are experiencing a type of remediation of social identity, affected by the situating and intensity of these new technologies. According to Roy Ascott, “as networked virtual reality transports our telepresence, and gives us the tools to ‘reconfigure’ our own identities, social life is becoming not only more complex, but more imaginative” (The Architecture of Cyberception).

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