Remediation: Understanding New Media - Hardcover

Bolter, J. David; Grusin, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262024527 ISBN 13: 9780262024525

Publisher: Mit Pr, 1999

Synopsis

"Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin see through new media, seeing through in every sense of that phrase: staying with it, seeing with it, and most of all looking past it, both forward and back. They 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." -- Michael Joyce, Vassar College

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.

About this title

About the Author

Jay David Bolter is Wesley Professor of New Media Studies, and Richard Grusin is Professor and Chair, both in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology.

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.

(Choice)

Edition details

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0262024527
• ISBN 13: 9780262024525
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 295