REMEDIATION

There is a real effective presence of media in our culture. It has a claim to reality as more of a cultural artifact such as photographs, films and computer applications being as real as building and aeroplanes.  There are two logics of remediation which both have a history for their interplay which defines a genealogy that dates way back to the Renaissance and the invention of linear perspective.

Within our digital media culture today hypermedia plays upon our desire for immediacy and transparent immediacy which makes us hyper-conscious of our act of seeing. The term immediacy refers to the idea of closeness like people would be with their families and friends. It is an expression of our fascination with the medium itself. It has been described as ‘an entirely new kind of media experience born from the marriage of TV and computer technologies’. (Bolter, 2000, p.31)

Remediation puts us one step from reality when it involves the media. In early to mid-1990s, Hollywood produced numerous filmed versions of classic novels. ‘They do not contain any overt reference to the novels on which they are based; they certainly do not acknowledge that they are adaptations.’  (Bolter, 2000, p.44) Consumers going to watch these movies would have expected direct referencing to the novels they had previously read. The content or the storyline had been borrowed but had no direct reference or quote to the medium that had been created. As most other things remediation sets off a number of arguments, we can argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital age that we live in. It comes with both pro’s and con’s.  What we can’t argue is that remediation is a key factor in what industry uses to entertain us.

Bolter, J.D. (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media New Ed. (MIT Press. P.20-50)