Remediation and the Cultural Politics of New Media

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin

School of Literature, Communication, and Culture

Georgia Institute of Technology

Atlanta, GA 30332-0165 USA

As developed in a forthcoming book by Jay David Bolter and I, "remediation" refers to the way in which media (particularly but not exclusively new digital media) refashion prior media forms. This project starts from the recognition that at our current historical moment, digital media have developed two very distinct, apparently contradictory, styles or logics of mediation. In the first, which we call "transparent immediacy," the goal of digital media is to erase or eliminate the signs of mediation--as epitomized most powerfully in virtual reality and photorealistic computer graphics. In the second, which we call "hypermediacy," the goal of digital media is to multiply and make visible the signs of mediation--as epitomized in the windowed style of the PC’s desktop or the World Wide Web. Although these two styles of mediation obey contradictory imperatives, we argue that they are the two necessary halves of a double logic of remediation, in which our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation, to erase its media in the very act of multiplying technologies of mediation. Our concept of remediation has three corollaries: that all mediation is remediation; that mediation and reality are inseparable; and that remediation is reform. It is this latter corollary that this paper focuses on.

Although we consider reform in a number of different senses, remediation clearly works as reform in a political sense, and again this sense has emerged with particular clarity in the case of digital media. A number of American political figures have even suggested that the World Wide Web and the Internet can reform democracy by lending immediacy to the process of making decisions. When citizens are able to participate in the debate of issues and possibly even vote electronically, they argue, we may substitute direct, "digital" democracy for our representational system. Even beyond claims for overt political reform, many technological enthusiasts assert that the web and computer applications are creating a digital culture that will revolutionize commerce, education, and social relationships.

That digital media can reform and even save society is reminiscent of the promise that has been made for technologies throughout much of the twentieth century. This is in many senses a peculiarly, if not exclusively, American promise; American culture seems to believe in technology in a way that European culture, for example, may not. Throughout the twentieth century, or really since the French Revolution, salvation in Europe has most often been defined in political terms--finding the appropriate (radical left or radical right or, in Tony Blair’s Britain, radical center) political formula. Even traditional Marxists, who believed in technological progress, subordinated that progress to political change. In America, however, collective (and perhaps even personal) salvation has been thought to come through technology rather than through political or even religious action. Contemporary American culture claims to have lost much of its naive confidence in technology. Still, what remains strong in our culture today is the conviction that technology itself progresses through reform: that technology reforms itself. In terms of our concept of remdiation, new technologies of representation proceed by reforming or remediating earlier ones, while earlier technologies are struggling to maintain their legitimacy by remediating newer ones. Technological enthusiasts argue that in remediating older media the new media are accomplishing social change. The gesture of reform is ingrained in American culture, which is perhaps why American culture takes so easily to strategies of remediation.

In this paper we take up the claims for reform in relation to three new technological manifestations of digital media: ubiquitous computing, mediated public spaces, and cyberspace generally. In so doing we want to begin to move towards an analysis of the cultural politics of the heterogenous networks within which these new media circulate.

We would begin with the quotidian observation that, by the standards of a generation ago, we have already achieved ubiquitous computing. In the 1950s and 1960s computers were large and very expensive devices locked in climate-controlled rooms and tended by a class of specialists. Today, tens of millions of computers are already busy remediating the real.

We would also note that ubiquitous computing reverses virtual reality in an important way. In reforming reality, the ubiquitous enthusiasts seem to want to avoid the shifts of perspective that characterize virtual reality. The question of the subject does not need to arise, because with ubiquitous computing we do not have to occupy different points of view. Instead, we stay put figuratively and even literally, while the computers bustle around -- opening files, opening windows, switching cameras and sound systems on and off -- to suit our needs. Instead of virtual reality, ubiquitous computing is genealogically related to the television and even the Internet. Like television and the Web, ubiquitous computing would be a network of mediating machines that span the world and enter into our daily lives. Like television and the Web, ubiquitous computing involves the constant monitoring of the quotidian. However, advocates of ubiquitous computing are not satisfied with mere monitoring, but want to affect what is monitored--hence teleoperation. Ubiquitous computing therefore insists aggressively on the reality of media in our social and physical world. Where virtual reality would reform reality by giving us an alternative visual world and insisting on that world as the locus of presence and meaning for us, recent proposals for "ubiquitous" or "distributed" computing would do just the opposite, but in the service of the same desire for reform.