Experiencing the Real

We offer this simple definition: a medium is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real. A medium in our culture can never operate in isolation, be- cause it must enter into relationships of respect and rivalry with other media. There may be or may have been cultures in which a single form of representation (perhaps painting or song) exists with little or no reference to other media. Such isolation does not seem possible for us to- day, when we cannot even recognize the representational power of a medium except with reference to other media. If someone were to in- vent a new device for visual representation, its inventors, users, and economic backers would inevitably try to position this device over against film, television, and the various forms of digital graphics. They would inevitably claim that it was better in some way at achieving the real or the authentic, and their claim would involve a redefinition of the real or authentic that favors the new device. (Pg: 65)

Whenever we focus on one aspect of a medium (and its relation- ships of remediation with other media), we must remember to include its other aspects in our discourse. In the case of film, for example, when we look at what happens on the screen (in a darkened theatre), we can see how film refashions the definitions of immediacy that were offered by stage drama, photography, and painting. However, when the film ends, the lights come on, and we stroll back into the lobby of, say, a suburban mall theatre, we recognize that the process of remediation is not over. We are confronted with all sorts of images (posters, computer games, and videoscreens), as well as social and economic artefacts (the choice of films offered and the pricing strategy for tickets and refreshments). We must be able to recognize the hybrid character of film without claiming that any one aspect is more important than the others. This is the claim implicit in most cultural studies analyses of popular media: that film and television embody or carry economic and cultural ideologies and that we should study media principally in order to uncover and learn to resist their ideologies. Although it is true that the formal qualities of the medium reflect their social and economic significance, it is equally tNe that the social and economic aspects reflect the formal or technical qualities (Kellner 1995). (Pg: 66)

In turn, actors and directors of television dramas want their work to be accorded the status of dramatic film. On stage, in film, or on television, the mark of being a true author or actor is "moving" the audience: offering an experience that the audience finds authentic. Film and television actors and directors could also lay claim to improving on stage drama, in the sense that their newer media handle popular subjects in accessible ways and appeal to a public that twentieth-century stage drama could no longer attract. (Pg: 69)

The two logics of remediation have a social dimension for the viewers as well as the practitioners. We have so far used the term immediacy in two senses: one epistemological, the other psychological. In the epistemological sense, immediacy is transparency: the absence of mediation or representation. It is the notion that a medium could erase itself and leave the viewer in the presence of the objects represented, so that he could know the objects directly. In its psychological sense, immediacy names the viewer's feeling that the medium has disappeared and the objects are present to him, a feeling that his experience is therefore authentic. Hypermediacy also has two corresponding senses. In its epistemological sense, hypermediacy is opacity the knowledge of the world comes to us through media. The viewer acknowledges that she is in the presence of a medium and learns through acts of mediation or indeed learns about mediation itself. The psychological sense hypermediacy is the experience that she has in and of the presence of media; it is the insistence that the experience of the medium is itself an experience of the real. The appeal to authenticity of experiences what brings the logics of immediacy and hypermediacy together.
This appeal is socially constructed, for it is clear that not only individuals, but also various social groups can vary in their definitions of the authentic. What seems immediate to one group is highly mediated to another. (Pg: 70)

Remediation is the replication or mechanical reproduction; however, we cannot discuss social and political dimensions without pausing to reflect on Walter Benjamin's influential essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1969). Benjamin's argument is that mechanical reproduction produces a fundamental change in the nature of art, a change that destroys the artwork's "aura" by removing it from the context ritual and tradition in which art had been historically embedded. (Pg: 73)

Film for Benjamin is a medium that demonstrates the inseparability of technology and reality. He emphasizes the complicated apparatus surrounding the production of film, as a result of which &ere is no unity or wholeness in the surrounding scene. It requires elaborate camera work, editing, and other forms of reproduction to make film appear seamless, to make its mediation disappear. Ironically, although filmmakers work hard to conceal the signs of material and technological mediation, their final product calls attention (through the rapid succession of images) to its aesthetic, temporal, and formal mediation in a way that traditional painting does not. For Benjamin, the painter and the cameraman practice very different crafts. In a period such as ours today, in which media and the process of mediation are more frankly acknowledged and appreciated, the aesthetic goal and its political consequences seem to be different. The work of art today seems to offer "an aspect of reality which cannot be freed from mediation or remediation," at the same time that new media seek to present us precisely with "an aspect of reality which is free from all mediation:' Thus remediation does not destroy the work of art;instead it always refashions that aura in another media form. (Pg: 75)

It may well be that film and other technologies of transparent immediacy enact a gendered form of looking. On the other hand, visual media can pursue other router to immediacy than perfect transparency. Television's claim to immediacy depends not only on its transparency (conventional television is not as visually precise as film), but also on its ability to present events 'live." @ p. 187. The immediacy of such new media as computer games and the World Wide Web is supposed
come through interactivity-the fact that these media can change their point of view in response to the viewer or user. Indeed, interactivity even forms part of virtual reality's claim to immediacy. Finally, there is the immediacy that comes through hyper-immediacy an immediacy that grows out of the frank acknowledgment of the medium and is not based on the perfect visual re-creation of the world. In such cases, we do not look through the medium in linear perspective; rather, we look at the medium or at a multiplicity of media that may appear in windows on a computer screen or in the fragmented elements of a collage or a photomontage. We do not gaze; rather, we glance here and there at the various manifestations of the media. (Pg: 81).

Source:-

Bolter, J. David, Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding new media (mit Press, 2000). 

The purity of form

Media theorist Erkki Huhtamo (1995) points out that acknowledgment is characteristic of our culture's attitude to digital technology in general: "Technology is gradually becoming a second nature, a territory both external and internalised, and an object of desire. There is no need to make it transparent any longer, simply because it is not felt to be in contradiction to the 'authenticity' of the experience" (171). And Huhtamo is right to insist that hypermediacy can also provide an "authentic" experience,at least for our current culture. (Pg: 42)

On the opening page of Understanding Media (1964), 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. (Pg: 45)

 In fact, all of our examples of hypermediacy are characterised 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 remediation, 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 competition or rivalry between the new media and the old. (Pg: 45)

Media theorist Steven Holtzman (1997) argues that repurposing 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 interesting, enjoyable, comfortable, or well accepted they are, they are, these approaches [repurposing] borrow from existing paradigms. They weren't conceived with digital media in mind, and as a result they don't exploit the special qualities that are unique to digital worlds. Yet it's those unique qualities that will ultimately define entirely new languages of expression. And it's those languages that will tap the potential of digital media as new vehicles of expression. (Pg: 50).

Hypermedia and transparent media are opposite manifestations of the same desire: the desire to get past the limits of representation and to achieve the real. They are not striving for the real in any metaphysical sense. Instead, the real is defined in terms of
the viewer's experience;it is that which would evoke an immediate (and therefore authentic) emotional response. Transparent digital applications seek to get to the real by bravely denying the fact of mediation; digital hypermedia seek the real by multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as reality. Both of these moves are strategies of remediation.' There are two paradoxes at work here. One is that hypermedia could ever be thought of as achieving the unmediated (Pg: 51).
(The logic of remediation we describe here is similar to Derrida's (1981) account of mimesis, where mimesis is defined not ontologically or objectively in terms of the resemblance of a representation to its object bur rather intersubjectively in terms of the reproduction of the feeling of imitation or resemblance in the perceiving subject. '"Mimesis here is nor the representation of one thing by another, the relation of re- semblance or identification between

two beings, the reproduction of a product of nature by a product of art. It is not the relation of two products but of two productions.")

The excess of media becomes an authentic experience, not in the sense that it corresponds to an external reality, but rather precisely because it is does not feel compelled to refer to anything beyond itself. As with MTV, the viewer experiences such hypermedia not through an extended and unified gaze, but through directing her attention here and there in brief moments. The experience is one of the glance rather than the gaze, a distinction that Bryson (1983) has drawn in order to understand the semiotics of Western painting (cf. Bryson 1981). (Pg: 53)

In his work on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson (1991)has traced out the connection between the "linguistic turn"and what he calls"mediatization:' Jameson describes the spatialisation of postmodern culture as "the process whereby the traditional line arts are mediatized: that is, they now come t o consciousness of them- selves as various media within a mediatic system in which their own internal production also constitutes a symbolic message and the taking of a position on the status of the medium in question" (162). Jameson's mediatization of the traditional fine arts is a process of remediation, in which media (especially new media) become systematically dependent on each other and on prior media for their cultural significance. What Jameson describes as mediatization may be true not only of postmodern new media but also of prior visual media as well. What he identifies as new and truly postmodern in fact reflects an attitude toward mediation that, while dominant today, has expressed itself repeatedly in the genealogy of Western representation.

Jameson himself seems to recognise this genealogy (Pg: 56)

he most powerful form of this "critical and disruptive challenge" is video, whose "total flow" threatens the physical and temporal differences that constitute linguistic meaning- even as the "available conceptualities for analysing" media like video "have become almost exclusively linguistic in orientation:" Proclaimed by Jameson the dominant medium of our postmodern age, video simultaneously depends on and disrupts literary and linguistic theory. For Jameson, literary theory, and by extension the traditional humanist enterprise, is redefined by popular visual culture. In fact, television, film, and now computer graphics threaten to remediate verbal text both in print and on the computer screen-indeed, to remediate text so aggressively that it may lose much of its historical significance.'


In We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Bruno Latour takes us further in understanding the role of postmodern theory in out media-saturated, technological culture. For Latour, as for Jameson, contemporary theory gives a special status to language and interpretation: "Whether they are called 'semiotics,' 'semiology' or 'linguistic turns,' the object of all these philosophies is to make discourse not a transparent intermediary that would put the human subject in contact with the natural world, but a mediator independent of nature and society alike" (62).Contemporary theory thus makes it difficult to believe in language as a neutral, invisible conveyor of fully present meaning either between speaker writer and listener reader or between subjects and objects, people and the world. Instead, language is regarded as an active and visible mediator that fills up the space between signifying subjects and nature. But language is not the only mediator; it operates just as visual media operate in their tasks of remediation. Postmodern theory errs in trying to isolate language as a cultural force, for it Fails to appreciate how language interacts with other media, other technologies, and other cultural artifacts. For Latour, the phenomena of contemporary technoscience consist of intersections or "hybrids" of the human subject, language, and the external world of things, and these hybrids ate as teal as their constituents-in fact, in some sense they are mote real because no constituent (subject, language, object) ever appear in its pure form, segregated from the other constituent. The events of our mediated culture are constituted by combinations of subject, media, and objects, which do not exist in their segregated forms. Thus, there is nothing prior to or outside the act of mediation. (Pg: 57). 

   

Source:-

Bolter, J. David, Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding new media (mit Press, 2000).