"Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation"

This is chapter one from Bolter and Grusin's Remediation: Understanding New Media. 

Bolter and Grusin begin this chapter with the acknowledgement that they are not putting forward some "universal truth," but rather exploring immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation as "practices of specific groups in specific times" (21)--that is, contextualized (a good point for any argument ones makes, I would think!).  Their main target is the cacophony of contemporary media, whose "twin occupations" are "the transparent presentation of the real and the enjoyment of the opacity of media themselves" (21).  This point is their overarching claim for the chapter.

They begin with a discussion of transparency in media.  Most interesting and relevant to my project are their applications with photography.  They describe photography as a "mechanical and chemical process, whose automatic character seemed to many to complete the earlier trend to conceal both the process and the artist" (26).  The concealing of the process and artist is that desired transparency of the media.  In this case, with photography, you get what you look at. They bring in Stanley Cavell, then, who claims that "Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting...by automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction" (26).  Now, of course, self-portraits are extremely interesting in this regard!  The subject is right there in front of the camera (or mirror).  It seems like the subject (in selfies) is quite often trying to remove that mediation, the camera, when attempting to take that selfie.  This could be something along the lines of trying to remove that technological influence on the self-identity.

Their thoughts on hypermediacy will become most relevant for any discussion on the publication and proliferation of selfies as individual photos and as a genre.  They write that "In every manifestation, hypermediacy makes us aware of the medium or media and (in sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious ways) reminds us of our desire for immediacy" (34). The space of hypermediation w/r/t selfies would be, I think, the Instagram/Pinterest/Twitter/Facebook pages where they are published.  Though the overall attempt is to create a whole sense of unmediated "self" with these pages, the hypermediation is clear: there are pictures, videos, and texts everywhere, all linking together within these pages.  The desire for immediacy is the desire for a direct communication with that identity we're looking at on Facebook, to get a "real look" into the real person--but that real look is hypermediated through a variety of media.  In this is the logic of hypermediacy, as described by Bolter and Grusin, "which expresses the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and as a "real" space that lies beyond the mediation" (41, italics mine).  Hypermediacy will probably be very important in exploring how selfies are shared, presented, and interpreted.