Remediation: Understanding New Media / Edition 1

by Jay David Bolter

Overview

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 illustrated study, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin offer a theory of mediation for our digital age that challenges this assumption. 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. 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.

In chapters devoted to individual media or genres (such as computer games, digital photography, virtual reality, film, and television), Bolter and Grusin illustrate the process of remediation and its two principal styles or strategies: transparent immediacy and hypermediacy. Each of these strategies has a long and complicated history. A painting by the seventeenth-century artist Pieter Saenredam, a photograph by Edward Weston, and a computer system for virtual reality are all attempts to achieve transparent immediacy by ignoring or denying the presence of the medium. A medieval illuminated manuscript, an early twentieth-century photomontage, and today's buttoned and windowed multimedia applications are instances of hypermediacy--a fascination with the medium itself. Although these two strategies appear contradictory, they are in fact the two necessary halves of remediation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2900262522792
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	01/06/2000
Series:	The MIT Press
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Jay David Bolter is Wesley Chair of New Media and Codirector of the Augmented Media Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of Remediation: Understanding New Media (with Richard Grusin), Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art and the Myth of Transparency (with Diane Gromala), both published by the MIT Press, and other books.

Richard Grusin is Professor and Chair of English at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: The Double Logic of Remediation
I Theory
1 Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation
2 Mediation and Remediation
3 Networks of Remediation
II Media
4 Computer Games
5 Digital Photography
6 Photorealistic Graphics
7 Digital Art
8 Film
9 Virtual Reality
10 Mediated Spaces
11 Television
12 The World Wide Web
13 Ubiquitous Computing
14 Convergence
III Self
15 The Remediated Self
16 The Virtual Self
17 The Networked Self
18 Conclusion
Glossary
References
IndeX

What People are Saying About This

Choice

The authors do a splendid job of showing precisely how technologies like computer games, digital photography, film television, the Web, and virtual reality all turn on the mutually constructive strategies of generating immediacy and making users hyperaware of the media themselves...The authors lay out a provocative theory of contemporary selfhood, one that draws on and modifies current notions of the 'virtual' and 'networked' human subject. Clearly written and not overly technical,this book will interest general readers, students, and scholars engaged with current trends in technology.

N. Katherine Hayles

An instant classic, Remediation is required reading for anyone interested in the New Media, especially in relation to older forms of representation. This is one you won't want to miss!

Richard A. Lanham

Boleter and Grusin survey contemporary media, with broadranging theoretical sophistication, as an oscillating mixture of looking through the expressive medium and looking at it. They enrich their argument with carefully media commentators.

From the Publisher

"The authors do a splendid job of showing precisely how technologies like computer games, digital photography, film television, the Web, and virtual reality all turn on the mutually constructive strategies of generating immediacy and making users hyperaware of the media themselves.... The authors lay out a provocative theory of contemporary selfhood, one that draws on and modifies current notions of the 'virtual' and 'networked' human subject. Clearly written and not overly technical, this book will interest general readers, students, and scholars engaged with current trends in technology." M. Uebel, Choice

Michael Joyce

The authors provide a language for what we feel almost as a haptic irritation. Their 'double logic of remediation' provides a double dose of good sense and visionary calm, of sound scholarship and philosophic speculation.

William J. Mitchell

Provides a wide-ranging and erceptive account of these cross-media interconnections, and develop some useful new perspectives on emerging digital media and their uses.

Editorial Reviews

The authors do a splendid job of showing precisely how technologies like computer games, digital photography, film television, the Web, and virtual reality all turn on the mutually constructive strategies of generating immediacy and making users hyperaware of the media themselves...The authors lay out a provocative theory of contemporary selfhood, one that draws on and modifies current notions of the 'virtual' and 'networked' human subject. Clearly written and not overly technical, this book will interest general readers, students, and scholars engaged with current trends in technology.—Choice—

From the Publisher

The authors do a splendid job of showing precisely how technologies like computer games, digital photography, film television, the Web, and virtual reality all turn on the mutually constructive strategies of generating immediacy and making users hyperaware of the media themselves...The authors lay out a provocative theory of contemporary selfhood, one that draws on and modifies current notions of the 'virtual' and 'networked' human subject. Clearly written and not overly technical, this book will interest general readers, students, and scholars engaged with current trends in technology.

—Choice

Reviews

The authors do a splendid job of showing precisely how technologies like computer games, digital photography, film television, the Web, and virtual reality all turn on the mutually constructive strategies of generating immediacy and making users hyperaware of the media themselves...The authors lay out a provocative theory of contemporary selfhood, one that draws on and modifies current notions of the 'virtual' and 'networked' human subject. Clearly written and not overly technical, this book will interest general readers, students, and scholars engaged with current trends in technology.

Choice