Sense the whole World Wide Web is an exercise in replacement: “Print stays itself; electronic text replaces itself’ (232). When the user clicks on an
sense the whole World Wide Web is an exercise in replacement: “Print stays itself; electronic text replaces itself’ (232). When the user clicks on an underlined phrase or an iconic anchor on a web page, a link is activated that calls up another page. The new material usually appears in the original window and erases the previous text or graphic, although the action of clicking may instead create a separate frame within the same window or a new window laid over the first. The new page wins our attention through the erasure (interpenetration), tiling (juxtaposi- tion), or overlapping (multiplication) of the previous page. And beyond the Web, replacement is the operative strategy of the whole windowed style. In using the standard computer desktop, we pull down menus, click on icons, and drag scroll bars, all of which are devices for replacing the current visual space with another. Replacement is at its most radical when the new space is of a different medium-for example, when the user clicks on an underlined phrase on a web page and a graphic appears. Hypermedia CD-ROMs and windowed applications replace one medium with another all the time, confronting the user with the problem of multiple representation and challenging her to consider why one medium might offer a more appropriate representation than another. In doing so, they are per- forming what we characterize as acts of remediation. REMEDIATION In the early and mid-1990s, perhaps to a greater extent than at any other time since the 193Os, Hollywood produced numerous filmed ver- sions of classic novels, including Hawthorne, Wharton, and even Henry James. There has been a particular vogue for the novels of Jane Austen (Sense andSen~ibility, Pride andPrejudice, and Ernma). Some of the adapta- tions are quite free, but (except for the odd Clueless) the Austen films, whose popularity swept the others aside, are historically accurate in cos- tume and setting and very faithful to the original novels. Yet they do not contain any overt reference to the novels on which they are based; they certainly do not acknowledge that they are adaptations. Acknowl- edging the novel in the film would disrupt the continuity and the illu- sion of immediacy that Austen’s readers expect, for they want to view the film in the same seamless way in which they read the novels. The content has been borrowed, but the medium has not been appropriated or quoted. This kind of borrowing, extremely common in popular cul- ture today, is also very old. One example with a long pedigree are paint- ings illustrating stories from the Bible or other literary sources, where
apparently only the story content is borrowed. The contemporary enter- tainment industry calls such borrowing “repurposing”: to take a “prop- erty” from one medium and reuse it in another. With reuse comes a necessary redefinition, but there may be no conscious interplay between media. The interplay happens, if at all, only for the reader or viewer who happens to know both versions and can compare them. On the opening page of Undevstanding Media (19641, Marshall McLuhan remarked that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph (23-24). As his problematic examples suggest, McLuhan was not thinking of simple repurposing, but perhaps of a more complex kind of borrowing in which one medium is itself incorporated or represented in another medium. Dutch painters incorporated maps, globes, inscriptions, let- ters, and mirrors in their works. In fact, all of our examples of hyper- mediacy are characterized by this kind of borrowing, as is also ancient and modern ekphraris, the literary description of works of visual art, which W. J. T. Mitchell (1994) defines as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (151-152). Again, we call the representation of one medium in another rmediation, and we will argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media. What might seem at first to be an esoteric practice is so widespread that we can identify a spectrum of different ways in which digital media remediate their predecessors, a spectrum depending on the degree of perceived compe- tition or rivalry between the new media and the old. At one extreme, an older medium is highlighted and repre- sented in digital form without apparent irony or critique. Examples include CD-ROM (or DVD) picture galleries (digitized painrings or photographs) and collections of literary texts. There are also numerous web sites that offer pictures or texts for users to download. In these cases, rhe electronic medium is not set in opposition to painting, pho- tography, or printing; instead, the computer is offered as a new means of gaining access to these older materials, as if the content of the older media could simply be poured into the new one. Since the elecrronic verslon justifies itself by granting access to the older media, it wants to be traesparent. The digital medium wants to erase itself, so that the viewer stands in the same relationship to the content as she would if she were confronting the original medium. Ideally, there should be no difference between the experience of seeing a painting in person and on the computer screen, but this is never so. The computer always inter-
venes and makes its presence felt in some way, perhaps because the viewer must click on a button or slide a bar to view a whole picture or perhaps because the digital image appears grainy or with untrue colors. Transparency, however, remains the goal. Creators of other electronic remediations seem to want to em- phasize the difference rather than erase it. In these cases, the electronic version is offered as an improvement, although the new is still justified in terms of the old and seeks to remain faithful to the older medium’s character. There are various degrees of fidelity. Encyclopedias on CD- ROM, such as Microsoft’s Encarta and Grolier’s Electronic Enqclopedia, seek to improve on printed encyclopedias by providing not only text and graphics, but also sound and video, and they feature electronic searching and linking capabilities. Yet because they are presenting dis- crete, alphabetized articles on technical subjects, they are still recogniz- ably in the tradition of the printed encyclopedia since the eighteenth- century Encyclopddie and Encyclopaedia Bvitannica. In the early 1990s, the Voyager Company published series of “Expanded Books” on CD-ROM, an eclectic set of books originally written for printed publication, in- cluding Jurarric Park and Brave New World. The Voyager interface reme- diated the printed book without doing much to challenge print’s assumptions about linearity and closure. Even the name, “Expanded Books:’ indicated the priority of the older medium. Much of the current World Wide Web also remediates older forms without challenging them. Its point-and-click interface allows the developer to reorganize texts and images taken from books, magazines, film, or television, but the reorganization does not call into question the character of a text or the status of an image. In all these cases, the new medium does not want to efface itself entirely. Microsok wants the buyer to understand that she has purchased not simply an encyclopedia, but an electronic, and therefore improved, encyclopedia. The borrowing might be said to be translucent rather than transparent. The digital medium can be more aggressive in its remediation. It can try to refashion the older medium or media entirely, while still marking the presence of the older media and therefore maintaining a sense of multiplicity or hypermediacy. This is particularly clear in the rock CD-ROMs, such as the Emergency Broadcast Network’s Tellecom- munirations Breakdown, in which the principal refashioned media are music recorded on CD and its live performance on stage. This form of aggressive remediation throws into relief both the source and the target media. In the “Electronic Behavior Control System,” old television and
movie clips are taken out of context (and therefore out of scale) and inserted absurdly into the techno-music chant (fig. 1.8). This tearing out of context makes us aware of the artificiality of both the digital version and the original clip. The work becomes a mosaic in which we are simultaneously aware of the individual pieces and their new, in- appropriate setting. In this kind of remediation, the older media are presented in a space whose discontinuities, like those of collage and photomontage, are clearly visible. In CD-ROM multimedia, the dis- continuities are indicated by the window frames themselves and by but- tons, sliders, and other controls, that start or end the various media segments. The windowed style of the graphical user interface favon this kind of remediation. Different programs, representing different media, can appear in each window-a word processing document in one, a digital photograph in another, digitized video in a third-while clickable tools activate and control the different programs and media. The graphical user interface acknowledges and controls the discontinu- ities as the user moves among media. Finally, the new medium can remediate by trying to absorb the older medium entirely, so that the discontinuities between the two are minimized. The very act of remediation, however, ensures that the older medium cannot be entirely effaced; the new medium remains depeo- dent on the older one in acknowledged or unacknowledged ways. For example, the genre of computer games like Myst or Doom remediates cinema, and such games are sometimes called “interactive films:’ G3 p. 94 The idea is that the players become characters in a cinematic narra- tive. They have some control over both the narrative itself and the sty- listic realization of it, in the sense that they can decide where to go and what to do in an effort to dispatch villains (in Doom) or solve puzzles (in Myrt). They can also decide where to look-where to direct their graphically realized points of view-so that in interactive film, the player is often both actor and director. On the World Wide Web, on the other hand, it is television rather than cinema that is remediated. G3 p. 204 Numerous web sites borrow the monitoring function of broadcast television. These sites present a stream of images from digital cameras aimed at various parts of the environment: pets in cages, fish in tanks, a soft drink machine, one’s office, a highway, and so on. Al- though these point-of-view sites monitor the world for the Web, they do not always acknowledge television as the medium that they are re- fashioning. In fact, television and the World Wide Web are engaged in an unacknowledged competition in which each now seeks to remediate
the other. The competition is economic as well as aesthetic; it is a strug- gle to determine whether broadcast television or the Internet will dom- inate the American and world markets. Like television, film is also trying to absorb and repurpose digi- tal technology. As we have mentioned, digital compositing and other special effects are now standard features of Hollywood films, particu- larly in the action-adventure genre. And in most cases, the goal is to make these electronic interventions transparent. The stunt or special effect should look as “natural” as possible, as if the camera were simply capturing what really happened in the light. Computer graphics pro- cessing is rapidly taking over the animated cartoon; indeed, the take- over was already complete in Disney’s Toy Story. @ p. 147 And here too the goal is to make the computer disappear: to make the settings, toys, and human characters look as much as possible like live-action film. Hollywood has incorporated computer graphics at least in part in an attempt to hold off the threat that digital media might pose for the traditional, linear film. This attempt shows that remediation operates in both directions: users of older media such as film and television can seek to appropriate and refashion digital graphics, just as digital graph- ics artists can refashion film and television. Unlike our other examples of hypermediacy, this form of ag- gressive remediation does create an apparently seamless space. It con- ceals its relationship to earlier media in the name of transparency; it promises the user an unmediated experience, whose paradigm again is virtual reality. Games like Myst and Doom are desktop virtual reality applications, and, like immersive virtual reality, they aim to inspire in the player a feeling of presence. On the other hand, like these computer games, immersive virtual reality also remediates both television and film: it depends on the conventions and associations of the first-person point of view or subjective camera. @ p. 163 Science-fiction writer Ar- thur C. Clarke has claimed that “Virtual Reality won’t merely replace TV, It will eat it alive” (cited by Rheingold, 1991, back cover). As a prediction of the success of this technology, Clarke is likely to be quite wrong, at least for the foreseeable future, but he is right in the sense that virtual reality remediates television (and film) by the strategy of incorporation. This strategy does not mean that virtual reality can obliterate the earlier visual point-of-view technologies; rather, it en- sures that these technologies remain at least as reference points by which the immediacy ofvirtual reality is measured. Paradoxically, then, remedlation is as important for the logic of transparency as it is for hypermediacy.
Another category of refashioning must be mentioned here: the refashioning that occurs within a single medium-for example, when a film borrows from an earlier film, as Strange Days borrows from Vertlgo or when a painting incorporates another painting, as in Courbet’s Inte- rim ofMy Studio. This kind of borrowing is perhaps the most common, because artists both know and depend most immediately on predeces- sors in their own medium. This borrowing is fundamental not only to film and painting, but also to literature, where the play within a play (from Hamlet to Rorencrantz and Guildemtern Are Dead) or the poem within a poem or novel (from the Odysrey to Pwtruit afthe Artist) is a very familiar strategy. In fact, this is the one kind of refashioning that literary critics, film critics, and art historians have acknowledged and studied with enthuasiasm, for it does not violate the presumed sanctity of the medium, a sanctity that was important to critics earlier in this century, although it is less so now. Refashioning within the medium is a special case of remediation, and it proceeds from the same ambiguous motives of homage and rivalry-what Harold Bloom has called the “anxiety of influencen-as do other remediations. Much of what critics have learned about this special kind of refashioning can also help us explore remediation in general. At the very least, their work reminds us that refashioning one’s predecessors is key to understanding repre- sentation in earlier media. It becomes less surprising that remediation should also be the key to digital media. Media theorist Steven Holtzman (1997) argues that repurpos- ing has played a role in the early development of new media but will he left behind when new media find their authentic aesthetic: In the end, no matter how intererting, enjoyable, comfortable, or well accepted they are, there approacher [repzrporingl borrmu fim exirting paradigm. Thq weren’t conceived with digital media in mind, andas a rerult thq don’t exploit therpecialquaiitier that are unique to digital worldr Yet it’s thore unique qual- itier that will ultimately +e entirely new languager of exprmion. And it? thme languager that will tap thepotestial of digital media ar new [original italics] vehiclu of expres~ion. Repurporing ir a transitional rtep that allowr us to get a seczrefooting on unfamiliar tmin. But it isn’t whme wwe’llfind the entirely new dimenriom of digital worldr. We needto tranrcend the oldto dircwer completely new wwldr ofexpression. Like a road rign, repurporing ir a marker indicating thahalprofound change ii around the bend (1 5) From the perspective of remed~ar~on, Holtzman misses the point. He himself appeals to a comfortable, modernist rheconc, in
which digital media cannot be significant until they make a radical break with the past. However, like their precursors, digital media can never reach this state of transcendence, but will instead function in a constant dialectic wlth earlier media, precisely as each earlier medium functioned when it was introduced. Once again, what is new about dig- ital media lies in their particular strategies for remediating television, film, photography, and painring. Repurposing as remediation is both what is “unique to digital worlds” and what denies the possibility of that uniqueness.
Content Strategy CX for Digital Media Session 5. Content Remediation This is a one-part assignment worth 8 points. Preparation Read Remediation (pages 44-50) available as a PDF file in Brightspace. Review the Remediation Class Session Notes available as a PDF file in Brightspace. Assignment Summary When we acknowledge that the purpose of digital media is to serve the needs of content, we also recognize that (1) media compete against each other for digital content and that (2) some digital content is better suited for some media rather than others. That means that the fit between the medium and the message [the content] is important to consider and comprehend prior to design and communication because it helps us to understand what can and cannot be done with and to the digital content. This process tends to expose the digital content design and communication constraints that we must deal with.Likewise, recognizing that the Ôcontent of any medium is always another mediumÕ helps us to comprehend and understand the process of content repurposing. The representation of one medium in another medium is called REMEDIATION. The authors of the reading claim, correctly, that new digital media tends to REMEDIATE content from other mediums. New digital media does not present content it in original form. For instance, Twitter remediates the [newspaper, etc.] headline. Likewise, the headline remediates shouting. The Assignment (1)First, select one of the following forms of content mediation: Instagram, Snapchat, or The New YorkPost online (nypost.com).(2)Then, using the language and principles from the assigned remediation reading reflect on and identidythe ways that the medium you chose remediates its various forms of content. You can do this using thefollowing method:(a)First, identify what old form(s) of media it remediates(b)Then reflect on and consider how that remediation effects the content from its previous form.In other words, how it remediates it.(3)Finally, using the language and principles from the assigned reading, First summarize your findingsfrom 1 and 2 above and the answer the follow two-part question:(a)What, if any, are the positive effects of the content remediation? (how is the contenteffected/changed in positive ways)(b)What, if any, are the failures of the content remediation? (how is the content effected/changedin negative ways)
Your complete answer must be between 400-450 words total. Submitting the Assignment The assignment is to be submitted to Remediation assignment within the Assignment tab of the course site in Brightspace as a WORD document. If you submit a file type other than Word you will immediately lose 1 point. Use the following format: –
FORMS OF DIGITAL CONTENT MEDIATION
Forms of Digital Content MediationRecall that there are three forms:
immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation
And they are not mutually exclusive!
Forms of Digital Content MediationThis session we will consider REMEDIATION
DIGITAL CONTENT REMEDIATION
Digital Content RemediationRemediation is the third type of content mediation.
It is not mutually exclusive with immediacy or hypermediacy.
Immediacy and Hypermediacy
may include the REMEDIATION of content.
Digital Content RemediationSome keywords for REMEDIATION include
Adaptation
Reuse
RedeÞnition
Borrowing
Competition between Content Mediums
Erasure
Improvement
Absorption
Transcendence
Dialectic
LetÕs consider each of themÉ
Digital Content RemediationREMEDIATION can be deÞned as the adaption or reuse of existing content to ÔÞtÕ another medium. For exampleÉ
from Þlm to television or from comic book to video game.
MORE EXAMPLES:
Netßix is television remediated by the Internet
Instagram remediates the photo album
Digital Content RemediationRmediation may include REDEFINITION. In these situations the content and its meaning
change from one medium to another.
The show Last of Us is a remediation of a video game.
The characters might be the same, but the story itself
has been tweaked so the content has been is REDEFINED.
Digital Content RemediationRemediation may also include BORROWING For instance, some online newspapers try to make their
Internet-based (online) version similar to their print version
Compare and contrastÉ
New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/)
New York Post (https://nypost.com/)
Digital Content RemediationCOMPETITION between content mediums is also often related to remediation For example: Do you prefer to watch a movie in a theater or at your ÒHome TheatreÓ?
Would you prefer to try something on at the store or ÒVirtual Try-on?Ó
Do you prefer to watch shows on an iPad or a television?
Digital Content RemediationERASURE is also related to REMEDIATION A Òhome theatreÓ seeks to erase the need for going to a theatre.
Reading the NY Times online erases your need for the print version.
Playing the video game at home erases your need to go to an arcade.
Digital Content RemediationRemediation often involves IMPROVEMENT The Internet doesnÕt do too much thatÕs new. Mostly what it does is,
through REMEDIATION, improves over space and time our
access to and interactions with existing content and content forms.
Digital photography turns a chemical process into a mathematical one. This often photographs to all sorts of improvements: ÒDevelopingÓ the images immediately
Editing the images immediately.
Digital Content RemediationABSORPTION may not seem to obviousÉ It often includes a before and after and can be related to NOSTALGIA.
MP3Õs absorbed CDÕs
CDÕs absorbed casette tapes
Casette tapes absorbed 8-track tapes
8-track tapes absorbed vinyl records.
Vinyl records absorbed Radio
Radio absorbed live performances
The absorbed media doesnÕt necessarily go away forever. Often old ÒabsorbedÓ media continue to exist or return as ART and NOSTALGIA
For instance VINYL RECORDS.
Digital Content RemediationABSORPTION often leads to TRANSCENDENCE All that this means is that the remediated content in its new form
Is often perceived, but not by everyone, as BETTER than it was in its old form.
For instance digital comics vs printed comics
MP3Õs vs vinyl
TRANSENDENCE is often related to cultural values
Portability, convenience, time, space, ease of access, interactivity, etcÉ
Digital Content RemediationFinallyÉ REMEDIATION is often DIALECTICAL In other wordsÉ All new forms of digital content tend to reference one or more forms of earlier media.
For instanceÉ Netßix remediates and by doings to references both movie theaters and television.
CONCLUSION: The Internet doesnÕt do much that is new. It remediates a lot of old content forms in more culturally convenient ways.
Digital Content RemediationYour homework for next session: First, select one of the following forms of content mediation: Instagram, Snapchat, or The New York Post online (nypost.com). Then, using the language and principles from the assigned remediation reading reßect on and identify the ways that the medium you chose remediates its various forms of content. You will Þnd the complete homework instructions in Brightspace.
END.
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