The authors take a good section of the book examining various forms of remediation and demonstrat In Remediation: Understanding New Media, authors Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that new media is only new in the way it presents old media. They use the terms immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation often throughout the book, and despite their claim that you don't have to read the book front to back, you absolutely have to read the chapter that defines said terms or you'll be very lost. In Remediation: Understanding New Media, authors Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that new media is only new in the way it presents old media. ![]() Enjoy the tour of media, but don't buy into the theories therein.more I recommend this book, but with reservations. Nevertheless, for anyone interested in technology, Remediation is an excellent survey of today's technologies, which, admittedly, are fascinating. Not to mention their cursory deployments of Lacan, Zizek, Derrida, etc., which at some points make us feel like B&G don't really understand anything about postructuralism and psychoanalysis. Also, some of their arguments about transparency and the inherent desire for immediacy have plenty of holes. Not once do they examine the conditions of knowledge that have incited the novelty hypothesis (which is what Foucault would have done, and did with the repressive hypothesis and the humanist hypothesis of progress) because they can't seem to tame their own fascination with the "new" media whose newness they want to refute. Sometimes it even feels like they're arguing against themselves. B&G also spend far too much time describing the new technologies, and thus new possibilities, to be found in contemporary mediation. ![]() Remediation succeeds, more or less, in convincing us of this, but this is mostly because anyone who is familiar with the genealogical methodology will have already assumed that such is the case. The only element of Foucault in the book is the fact that it opposes the popular belief in the novelty of today's technology, from cyberspace and VR to telepresence and ubiquitous computing. Remediation claims, among other things, to be a Foucaultian genealogy of contemporary media. It's as if they shuffled a deck of citation cards and occasionally dealt one into the bibliography in an attempt to legitimize whatever they happened to be talking about. The theory is old (and often misrepresented, especially B&G's (mis)readings of Foucault and Baudrillard) and cited haphazardly, frequently, and much too randomly. Remediation clai This isn't a bad book, and it tries to say some interesting things (at which it sometimes succeeds) but the problem is that it doesn't try very hard. This isn't a bad book, and it tries to say some interesting things (at which it sometimes succeeds) but the problem is that it doesn't try very hard. ![]() They call this process of refashioning "remediation," and they note that earlier media have also refashioned one another: photography remediated painting, film remediated stage production and photography, and television remediated film, vaudeville, and radio.more They argue that new visual media achieve their cultural significance precisely by paying homage to, rivaling, and refashioning such earlier media as perspective painting, photography, film, and television. In this richly illustrated study, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin offer a theory of mediation for our digital age that challenges this assumption. Media critics remain captivated by the modernist myth of the new: they assume that digital technologies such as the World Wide Web, virtual reality, and computer graphics must divorce themselves from earlier media for a new set of aesthetic and cultural principles. In this richly A new framework for considering how all media constantly borrow from and refashion other media. ![]() A new framework for considering how all media constantly borrow from and refashion other media.
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