Remediation: Understanding New Media [Paperback]

Jay David Bolter (Author), Richard Grusin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0262522799 | ISBN-13: 978-0262522793 | Publication Date: February 28, 2000 | Edition: 1st

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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

About the Author

Jay David Bolter is Wesley Professor of New Media and Director, Center for New Media Research and Education in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech University.

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

Product Details

• Paperback: 307 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; 1st edition (February 28, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262522799
• ISBN-13: 978-0262522793
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #106,284 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #62 in Books > Arts & Photography > Other Media > Mixed Media

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book will change the way you watch CNN, August 16, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Remediation: Understanding New Media (Paperback)

In Remediation, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin analyze new technologies and their implications for American society. Although the book emphasizes the ways in which new media can be conceived in terms of recent literary and cultural theory, the theoretical discussions do not pervade the work. Therefore, the book can still be quite useful to those who don't wish to delve too deeply into theory. In fact, Bolter and Grusin acknowledge the different emphases of the book's chapters in their introduction and offer readers a guide to help them make the most of their experience with the book, with respect to the readers' goals. The three sections of the book discuss the authors' theory of remediation, the place of new media in American society, and the place of the Self within the context of new media.

In the first section of the book, Bolter and Grusin offer the notion of "remediation" as a way of thinking about new media. What they term "remediation" is "the formal logic by which new media technologies refashion prior media forms" (273). Bolter and Grusin attempt to contextualize their theories about new media within the framework of modern preoccupations with what they term "immediacy" and "hypermediacy." The desire for immediacy is a desire for a transparency in media that obliterates or lessens the perception of the media themselves in the viewer's mind. The reality of hypermediacy is the preoccupation with media itself and a hyper-awareness of the media through which our information comes. Bolter and Grusin place the logic of remediation within the context of our historical preoccupation with these trends. The new media discussed are primarily the visual: computer games, digital photography, photorealistic graphics, digital art, film, Virtual Reality, mediated spaces, television, and the World Wide Web. Discussing each of these media in great detail, the authors devote the second section of the book to demonstrating the way that the idea of remediation plays itself out in each. Bolter and Grusin examine how each new medium refashions older media and how they are often refashioned themselves. For example, they show that animated computer graphics draw upon the tradition of film and that film is now starting to draw upon the new offerings of computer graphics. They cite as their evidence a film such as Toy Story. Another example they point out is the remediation that occurs between television and the Internet. The Internet uses patterns established by television in order to determine how to appeal to viewers, and television uses new strategies of windowing images with the scrolling tickertapes and texts it has borrowed from Internet styles. Within the remediations that both new and old media undergo, Bolter and Grusin demonstrate how the twin desires for immediacy and hypermediacy are at work.

The final section on the Self attempts to discuss how the presence of the new media in our society affects individuals' perceptions of their own identities. By allowing people to engage in different discourse communities with different levels of immediacy and hypermediacy, the new media allow for a remediation of the notion of self and community. Bolter and Grusin specifically point to the immediacy of Virtual Reality as a starting point for empathy with other people and beings. If a person can use Virtual Reality to play the role of a gorilla, that person gains a new concept of his or her identity with respect to his or her experience as set apart from that of a gorilla. Bolter and Grusin also examine in detail whether the new media have implications for the mind-body split that is central to the theory of Cartesian dualism. Some argue that technologies such as Virtual Reality emphasize the split by creating a disembodied environment for the mind to inhabit. Bolter and Grusin, however, ultimately claim that such technologies cannot allow people to escape the perception of their own bodies. In fact, by allowing for new ways to conceive of the body and the mind, new media allow for a remediation of the body that is parallel to the remediation of the Self.

Overall this book offers interesting theories about the way technology functions in our society. It is, therefore, a good starting point for anyone who wants to consider the implications of using this technology and thereby becoming complicit in the culture's striving for immediacy and hypermediacy in our interactions with technology. Those implications would continue further for us as we remediate our old styles of teaching or otherwise interacting with technology to suit the newer forms that will inevitably appear.

Of course, to be concerned about how your use of technology fits into this framework, you must first be convinced by Bolter's and Grusin's arguments that remediation is a force at work in our society. Personally, I find their arguments convincing in their simplicity of structure and in their wealth of evidence. Although the discussions of Lacanian, Freudian, feminist, Marxist, and other theoretical approaches can be at times heavy-handed, underneath there is an insightful commentary on the way technology functions in our society.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Remediating without knowing it!, April 14, 2001

By 

Chantal M. tremblay (Lisbon,Portugal) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Remediation: Understanding New Media (Paperback)

This book was most enligthening, it explained in a very structured form, what it is we were doing when creating content for new medias. As Moliere said, "doing prose without knowing it", I have used my newly acquired epistemology of remediation extensively to better explain to our young designers what it is they were doing when "re-mediating" clients'content for a new media application, be it Web, Multimedia apps or art-tech.The authors are themselves professors/researchers an use a very didactical stream of thoughts which has been exceedingly usefull to me, to better convey concepts for which I had a feeling, but nowhere near the "theory of remediation" that the authors convey.

As an art/tech buff, who happens to earn a living with technical content remediation and hard core applications programming, the book reconciled me with a new perpesctive on the similarities between these activities. Grusin and Bolter are challenging us to excellence in remediation whatever the final purpose.

The most important concept that the authors brought to me, was that more and better remediation has often nothing to do with more technology, and much more to do with better and more effective (or intelligent) ways to communicate.

In my view this book is a must reading, and a reference book for anyone producing content with a certain degree of awareness. If you believe that the new media demand a "different" attitude,this is a textbook for you.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Some Poop for Your New Media Punch Bowl, April 5, 2011

By 

VideoGordo "VideoGordo" (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Remediation: Understanding New Media (Paperback)

McLuhan once said that in great books there is usually a great deal of redundancy. Remediation demonstrates that such can be said for "other" sorts of books also.

The basic function of this book is to reinforce an already apparent bias in favour of new media as: easy to understand; easy to reconcile with; defined in childishly simplistic tautologies; remediating to the general population when left unexamined.

Without being too blunt, this work is mostly a manual of guiding principles for new media industry functionaries. The intervening decade since it was published, with its social media patterns in mind, has made this one of the least prophetic ever written in the field of media science. Furthermore, any sound extrapolation of active patterns at the time of its publication speak enough as it is to its uselessness as a serious contribution to the subject.

The basis of this book is the idea that new media, digital media, and our new media environment somehow have an intrinsic capacity to "remedy" one's perception of one's self and body. A new bodily awareness born of ablation? A new boldly misguided unawareness born of foolishly optimistic assumptions, I would argue.

No clear-thinking observer of media science could possibly find this book contributory or instructive in the discipline. The premise is almost goofy, and misreads all that we can extrapolate from established models while comprehensively failing to introduce or illustrate a new method of dealing with the subject that can be taken at all seriously. So much so that it is tempting to read this book as a sarcastic satire of the childish bewilderment native to our contemporary western media circumstance.

Media act on media, media act on people. You cannot act on information productively or competently without reconciling with the implied modes of the medium by which it is carried. The authors of Remediation will basically agree with this, or at least they would if they bothered to understand it before carelessly appropriating it from McLuhan, yet they fail to offer any kind of involved program for it, and instead rely on their mistaken notions about the civilizing nature of new media to correct or improve the human experience, entirely ignoring the crucial step of active recognition of perceptive habits on the part of the consumer of media. "New media contextualize and connect, while remedying and illuminating," is the grossly mistaken assumption on their part. Can it be substantiated? I would say, not even remotely.

Those actively involved with new media love this book because it appeals to a confirmation bias. I am unsurprised that many schooling institutions instructing and forming the future producers and disseminators of new media content find this book to be a veritable bible.

This book, as advertised, does not intend to act as a technical text, but rather a simple general-reader introduction to the nature of our new media world. It lives up to its format; it is indeed remedial. It is also false. It leaves unequipped readers less aware and less capable of dealing with their current manufactured environment than when they began. It is well received and treasured exactly because it is so simplistic and superficial. The common aversion to depth of focus and lack of critical depth is informed by the natural configuration of our new media environment and the lack of tools to meaningfully cope with it, and this truth needs to form the core of any serious text on the subject. This book is "worse than useless," promoting a hopeless and doomed state of blissful intellectual indolence.