Remediation Understanding New Media

by Jay David Bolter

Hardcover, ?

Collection

Media Theory

Status

Available

Call number

702

Description

A new framework for considering how all media constantly borrow from and refashion other media. 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.… (more)

Genres

User reviews

LibraryThing member breadhat

Written in the late 1990s, this book is little worse for wear. It lays out a highly useful and understandable framework for how media borrow from each other and situate themselves in relation to other media. It is not difficult to fill in the blanks regarding more recent developments, and the

authors' theories are not less useful for being dated. On the negative side, the book is a bit overlong; I'd agree with the below reviewer that the connections to critical theory can be superficial or dubious, and the ending chapters are not as strong as the rest of the book. However, this book addresses in detail a field of inquiry that is only touched upon by most of other sources I have read. I highly recommend it to anyone taking a theoretical approach to new media.

Show Less

3 more

LibraryThing member george.d.ross

I started out really liking this book, mostly because it suggests a much-needed break from McLuhan and Ong. I appreciated the authors' rejection of technological determinism, and I was intrigued by their ideas of the complex interplay between immediacy and remediation. But then, around chapter

three I realized they had put all their good stuff up front and really had nothing new to add. Also, while most of their points stand reasonably well, their examples are so woefully out of date... It's a little embarrassing to read them going on and on about how Virtal Reality is going to change the world, when in fact... no. Not at all.

Show Less

LibraryThing member jonas.lowgren

There is an increasing interest in digital media within the field of media studies. Among the growing literature, the book by Bolter and Grusin stands out by striking a successful balance of analysis – between the genres and practices of traditional media and the particularities of the new ones.

LibraryThing member Ludi_Ling

I would agree with the previous reviewers in their estimation of this book. It was a fascinating read, and useful inasmuch as its proposed framework is directly applicable to 'new media' today. It's interesting to trace the lineage of 'new media' through this text, and how we are continuing to

remediate both new and old.

It is unfortunate that this book was published just on the cusp of many cultural events and artefacts that would have made it a stronger text, and perhaps gone a long way to proving many of its main hypotheses. Soon after it was published, movies like 'The Matrix' and 'Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within' were released. MUDs and MOOs gave way to the networked communities of Web 2.0 - social media. TiVo was born. Self-referential reality TV started to become wildly popular. 'The Sims' became the best-selling videogame of all time. 9/11 happened.

Considering all of the above, you can't help but read this book and feel disappointed. There was so much it could have tackled, so much for it to analyse, dissect and get its teeth into, if only it had been written even a year or two years later down the line. As it is, its left for us to fill in the gaps, to think about how the years of, say, 1999-2004 changed so profoundly the way we mediate, remediate and define ourselves in relation to the remediated/hypermediated world around us.

Show Less

Fewer