Remediation is summarized most
accurately with an example. You know that movie you saw last week that was
based on a novel or a comic book? That’s remediation. It is essentially the
appropriation of the content of one medium into another. Marshall McLuhan said
it best: “The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a
message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name.
This fact characteristic of all media, means that the “content” of any medium
is always another medium”.
Remediation refers to the blending
of old and new media, and not always unidirectional. Old media can remediate
new media as well, as an attempt to reassert themselves in a world where
digital media rule. Digital technologies don’t radically change the medias cape
so much as alter and add to older media, as with the Web borrowing from
television, photography, film, and print. The term can also refer to the
blending of several different forms of media in one document, such as with the
integration of a large, ornately decorated letter at the beginning of chapters
in medieval texts; it is a fusion of images and words and yet they constitute
parts of a whole. Remediation has not newly emerged along with digital technologies,
but has existed for centuries.
One component of modern remediation
is distantiation. This term refers to the individualization and deconstruction
of mainstream media. This often happens simultaneously with remediation, and it
results in the borrowing of form coupled with the subversion of content. The
individual (a blogger, for example) comments on mass news media while imitating
techniques used by those same mainstream journalists. Remediation does not
refer to a fundamental opposition to the mainstream, so much as the desire of
the individual to express themselves.
It is worth mentioning the concepts
of immediacy and hypermediacy which figure into a “double logic” of remediation.
Immediacy refers to the idea that our culture wants to erase all hints of
mediation by making the medium invisible, while hypermediacy refers to the
exact opposite – wanting to infinitely multiply our media and heighten our
awareness of them. Every medium wants to improve upon older media through
creating a more immediate experience. However, this promise of a newer and more
authentic experience causes an awareness of the “new medium as a medium… thus,
immediacy leads to hypermediacy”. Some examples of media that attempt to
achieve immediacy are photography, linear perspective painting, and Hollywood
film. On the other hand, hypermedia is exemplified by stage productions in
popular music, the Web, and television. While this is not so much a problem in
and of itself, it still speaks to our culture’s poor media literacy.
Additionally, McLuhan takes issue
with the focus on content in studying media. When it comes to reading and
consuming media, he calls us numb, technological idiots. “The effect of
the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium
as “content.” The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera,” he
says, “The “content” of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost
entirely unaware either of print or of speech”. Essentially, remediation is a
seemingly simple concept that still manages to evade us, and it has scholars
frustrated.
Though the concept of remediation
has been recognized for a long time, digital technologies are changing what it
means. New media are and will continue to do precisely what their predecessors
have done in the past. They will refashion other forms of media, presenting
themselves as new, improved versions. Digital media “can best be understood
through the ways in which they honor, rival, and revise” other media.
Remediation, coupled with participation and “bricolage” will figure heavily
into a greater sense of individual involvement in media. Individuals will
contribute meaning, modify and reform ways of understanding media, and assemble
personal versions of that media. Remediation therefore will not be left to a
film re-presenting a novel, but will be a tool in the hands of individuals
navigating the mediated world.
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