Remediation

In the world of digital media, things are happening faster than we have ever imagined. In the beginning of the 90’s we started seeing our first Web browsers, almost five years after that people were making their own web pages and online sites. Soon after came even more advanced work such as computer graphics, virtual reality and social networking. Social networking used a many-to-many level, with groups such as MySpace and Facebook. If we look back to the beginning of communication we would find that it started with speech. Writing was introduced as representations of spoken sounds. Writing becomes the recording for someone’s speech, these characters, letters and symbols aren’t actually “words” per say, but rather representations of words. It is clear when you look at the evolution of media, that when a new medium is introduced no one is quite sure what you can do with it; therefore, everyone does what they did with the old medium first. The idea is known as remediation.

According to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin this understanding of new media is called remediation. Remediation is the incorporation or representation of one medium in another medium. According to their book Remediation: Understanding New Media, remediation is a defining characteristic of new digital media because digital media is constantly remediating its predecessors such as radio, television and other forms of old media. Bolter and Grusin are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other with newer media. When a new medium is produced, many people will produce upon the negatives of the preceding medium and will deliver meaning almost immediately. This in fact is not true. Yes, they are improving, but it takes time. Look at our newest media Google+, a social network attempting to replace Facebook. Google+ is at its preliminary stages, and as it appears they are in no way ready to take over such a powerful company and always improving group such as Facebook. In fact, Facebook was in Google+’s shoes seven years ago when they were competing with MySpace. By improving upon a predecessor, new media justifies itself. The rhetoric of remediation favors immediacy and transparency, even though as the medium matures, it offers new opportunities for hypermediacy.