"Introduction: The Double Logic of Remediation," Remediation: Understanding New Media (prototype post)

Summary and Key Ideas:

I reach over my print book to type on my laptop through this blog, and the interplay of media suddenly becomes more apparent and clearer.  In their introduction to Remediation: Understanding New Media, Bolter and Grusin lay down the fundamental logic for their work.  People using and appropriating media attempt "both to multiply [their] media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them" (5).  The medium should disappear if you're sending the message well enough. The reader should forget they're reading a letter; the viewer should forget they're not actually in early modern England; the internet traveler should think as if they're actually in south Moorhead. Thankfully, no mediation is so "perfect" as to allow one to be in Moorhead when they're not in Moorhead.  (Interestingly enough, note the shadow of the Google-camera-car-thing: one part of the mediation coming through into the message!  Very cool.)

However, our strive for "immediacy," i.e., being in the moment, really there, etc., seems to be very strong in the user, even if it's impossible to achieve.  It's impossible because media and hypermedia are codependent; the authors don't give a precise definition of hypermedia (perhaps it's expected of a normal reader of this kind of book), but I take it to be the mixing of media because that's how they're talking about it.  Our strive for immediacy drives us to create and propagate multiple media, resulting in hypermedia.  I could not pick out a precise definition of "remediation" within this section, but in how they're using it, I imagine it to be the process by with we hypermediate media (a process not peculiar to the recent technological and media explosion).  Essentially, no media exists in isolation; all media work with other media (remediate?) to produce hypermedia--all due to the drive for immediacy in the creator and viewer.  More to come on the term "remediation" later.


Seemingly most important takeaway:  People really want to collapse the media and strive for immediacy with the event; all media remediate (?) other media.

Important quotes:

"Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them" (5)

"Logic of immediacy dictates that the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented: sitting in the race car or standing on a mountaintop" (5).

"They are all attempts to achieve immediacy by ignoring or denying the presence of the medium and the act of mediation. All of them seek to put the viewer in the same space as the object viewed" (11).

"No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, and more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces. What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media" (14-5).

Questions:
What precisely is hypermediation?  The mixing of media? Remediation?