New Remediation: A Play on TermsJennifer Wallace

IDIA619

May 18, 2005

As the terms old and new are both relative, only conveying meaning in comparison to another noun, the

malleability inherent in the terms themselves leads to vagueness, as the newness or oldness of the

modified signifier can only be perceived in a specific context. Since media, as shown by Bolter and

Grusin’s theory of remediation, are a tool for the constant flux of perceived immediate and mediated

(hypermedia) objects, the term media, by its definition, poses difficulties for its qualification by

oppositional terms, such as these, that cause one to want to house the compared objects in solid boxes

of stable meaning. With technological advances pushing the stability of information past the capacity of

the human mind’s ability to process and rank the timeliness of what is experienced, perhaps the concept

of old and new should be thrown out altogether and replaced by a more applicable means of

classification, that of dot notation, a communicative qualifier that is a product of digital media itself.

After all, discourses have always modified language.

Although Bolter and Grusin are on target concerning the cyclical nature of media, by using outdated

modifiers they are perhaps neglecting the more significant innovations digital media offer—the ability

for a remediation to be virtually old and new simultaneously, as the empathetic and multiple points of

view of the self interacting with contemporary media and reality are forced into constant reflection and

reevaluation at an ever increasing pace. Digital media, by theoretically giving anyone the ability to

challenge the man behind the curtain by replicating his cherished medium and the power that goes

along with high-literacy of the discourse at hand, allows those who will take up the gauntlet the ability

to call attention to the context, to observe how Bolter and Grusin’s old media, such as writing, film, and

television—which previously enjoyed long expanses of cultural dominance—measure up to the

challenge of digital media and contemporary technology; this challenge brings the power of information

back full circle to its origins, the human mind’s yearning for change and innovation. New digital media

have not changed the rules of the game; they have merely brought our culture to a point where there are

so many players that one finds it difficult to construct the definitions and rules of the game before the

game changes once more.

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Bolter and Grusin comment that “New digital media are not external agents that come to disrupt an

unsuspecting culture. They emerge from within cultural contexts, and they refashion other media,

which are embedded in the same or similar contexts.”1 This reference to the importance of cultural

context exemplifies how the terms new and old are not adequate. Perhaps one should refer to the media

along the lines of the following, as the descriptor functions as both the label and contextual qualifier:

Media.remediationOfThisMedia.timeMediaWasBroughtIntoExistence.authorX.format.

If, by using digital media, we can have multiple versions of the same media—commonly seen when

files are named through dot notation in database hierarchies using version control methodologies—

which all possess similar and comparable attributes when one evaluates the effects of the media on the

audience, we then render the comparison of old and new media obsolete. If an inherent quality of digital

media is its capacity to exponentially multiply and maintain interaction with countless viewers and

re/creators simultaneously, while each version can offer different renditions and points-of-view without

rendering any of the other versions obsolete, there is no advantage to referencing any media with the

term new or old, for each mediated message exists as a relative notion of an evolving context. This

contextual occurrence was also present during the peak of print and older electronic media; however,

the frequency, magnitude, and re/creator’s awareness of this instability of the author-ownership claim

on media—a tool based on relativity—was overlooked by the grace period allotted by the slower

progression of technology—an advantage no longer offered to any form of media or mediator.

Bolter and Grusin personify old media and new media as they further their definition of remediation,

“Older electronic and print media are seeking to reaffirm their status within our culture as digital media

are invoking the twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy in their efforts to remake themselves and

each other.”(5. As humans have yet to encounter a medium able to perceive, interpret, and experience

feelings of inadequacy regarding its current status quo, thereby desiring to modify and change itself to

keep current, it would be more correct to say that humans who stand to gain from the reaffirmation of

the status of print, film, and television are trying regain their past glory. The power struggle that exists

within any notion of change is by no means new.

1 Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press:Cambridge, MA. 2001. pg. 19.

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Although the authors do not forgo the terms altogether, Bolter and Grusin do recognize the

incongruencies of their terminology: “As we have shown, what is in fact new is the particular way in

which innovation rearranges and reconstitutes the meaning of earlier elements. What is new about new

media is therefore also old and familiar: that they promise the new by remediating what has gone

before.” (270) While deconstructing Bolter and Grusin’s terminology, it is interesting to note the

significance of the etymology of the terms old and new. Old is derived from the Latin verb alo, a verb

meaning to nurse, breast-feed, nourish, promote growth, increase, and strengthen. New can trace its

Latin heritage to the adjective novus, meaning fresh, novel, young, unexpected, strange, recent, or

modern.2 One can see how Bolter and Grusin’s usage of the terms could get murky by considering the

following statement, novam infantem alere: to feed the new baby. A nourished baby, just like a

nourished medium, is a thing that another subject has chosen to preserve. Old media could be seen as

media that must be nourished and coddled to maintain its current status. If old media meant media

whose existence was at stake, then the archival functionality offered by digital media would put any and

all humans concerned with old media at ease, as the new media could easily accommodate references to

its predecessors along with its own innovations. However, the current cultural existence of the

stakeholders who have grown comfortable with the past context of print, film, and television, do not

want to share the power (a term itself racked in a struggle of definition of relative vs. absolute). Not all

old media authors are against change, but some think “Translation is reincarnation…And vice versa.”3

Remediation of old media nourishes the medium and the message, ensuring that ideas and intentions

survive and grow in the digital environment. Digital distribution offers the digitally mediated object

access uninhibited by time or location to shape and be shaped by the context in which any re/creator of

the mediated experience interacts with the artifact. This flexibility and additive quality offered by

digital media and its dot notation structure of qualification and quantification, lets all re/creators see

that “Anything is possible in an unfinished narrative,” and both old media and the fragmented self, a

self not open to changing perception, can rest assured that they played a part in remediating the world

as they knew it, even if it was at the expense of their favored rules of the game.4 In a discussion of the

networked self, Bolter and Grusin claim that current culture is experiencing the effects of digital media

2 Traupman, John C. The Bantam New College Latin and English Dictionary. Bantam Books:New York. 1995. pgs 53 and 276.3 Siegel, Lee. Love in a Dead Language. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago. 2000. pg. 242.4 Siegel, Lee. Love in a Dead Language. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago. 2000. pg. 327

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“[I]n place of the unity and consistency that we used to value…” (257) This new and uncomfortable

result of digital media is only experienced if “we” are not open to the nature of change and “we” are not

already practitioners of empathetic, multiple points of view. Proponents of digital media have embraced

and embodied the capabilities of emergent change; the willingness to accept the struggle of maintaining

a spiritual self, as defined by William James, which thrives on flexibility in the context of stable

instability, is the significant novelty of the culture in which digital media and its re/creators exist.

Bolter and Grusin mention William Jame’s definition of the spiritual self as “like the part of the

networked self that does the networking; it actively makes affiliations and associations. This active self

works through various media.” (233) Although new media enhance the ways and opportunities for

people to roleplay as alter-selves, this option of performance was certainly available through old media

as well. Consider the hypothetical case of a female 18th century novelist writing under a male

pseudonym who receives letters from a female admirer commenting on “his” latest publication. If the

female author were to conduct a purely textual relationship with the admirer, where she remained under

the guise of her imagined male self, would this not be equivalent of someone who interacts in

cyberspace using a “self” that is not parallel to his physical self?

When discussing an excerpt from a MUD wedding noted in Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen, Bolter

and Grusin state “This excerpt…shows how the immediacy can be pursued through the

acknowledgment of the medium and the genre.” (259) Any spiritual self that is not bent on solipsism is

constantly pursuing immediacy by interacting and acknowledging the medium and the genre—albeit

unconsciously, since we sometimes take rudimentary forms of linguistics and language for granted.

It is more difficult to make exact copies of old media than it is to simulate new media, as the old media

do not lend themselves to easy copying by the re/creator. New media is more technologically advanced

and digitally driven. The more media can be replicated, transferred, and dissociated from the creator,

the more one can use digital media to author/record one’s personal mark on the universe’s memory of

relation; at the same time, however, the more fleeting and ethereal the transmittable medium must

become. The more we incorporate and meld the medium and the message by digital formatting, the

more distant and intangible it becomes for any person to truly feel a unique and irreplaceable bond with

his act of remediation. One’s ability to personally identify with any media is quelled by the overbearing

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knowledge that the media can be personally claimed and modified by any re/creator who uses the

same tool.

As stated by Bolter and Grusin, “The process of remediation makes us aware that all media are at one

level a ‘play on signs,’ which is a lesson that we take from poststructuralist literary theory.” (19)

Everything represented by a linguistic sign is already remediated, thus every object is both a medium

and an element as it displays itself and the mediated context in which the audience perceives the

presented object. Any media that exists that does not have a physical form that can be referenced in

physical/spatial reality can be understood as an original simulacra, a contradiction of terms, but still

true. Any media or tool that allows a subject to create an artifact that changes its preexisting notion of

reality and the subjects/objects found in reality, is enacting remediation. Digital media have allowed us

to put all previous tools of self re-cognition—writing, painting, film, etc—in the same binary format.

Bolter and Grusin’s theory of remediation relies on the idea that “What is new about new media comes

from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media

refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media.” (15) However, there is no foundation

proving that the way in which one interacts with digital media has any effect of significantly altering

one’s specific re-actions to the mediated artifact any differently than if it were considered old media. A

person’s ability to develop and re-form his spiritual self is not profoundly affected by what type of

media he interacts with; on the contrary, the spiritual self’s ability to create novel responses to whatever

is mediated is the remarkable, yet age-old phenomena that has been the driving force behind all human

innovation since the invention of the first tool. Bolter and Grusin’s new media have not reinvented the

wheel; they simply let us re-cognize how we re-act to the wheel. If the only notable characteristic of self

that can’t be fragmented or manipulated by the media chosen as the instrument for self expression is

that it is the active self that mediates the media, how can one ever try to isolate and define this as a

constant, when the primary quality of the active self is to involve itself in action and re-action with its

environment through tools and signs?

All media exist for communication, which exists in a reality supported by the flux of relative

perceptions. Media tries to leave an imprint of communication; however, the newer the media, the less

sturdy and tangible the imprint. Through communication, humans are able to enhance tools for

interacting in relationships, which further enhance the tools, opening the doors for the development of

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more communicative options. A remediated print novel, the existence of which would not have

occurred prior to the advent of digital media, offers the following on the transient nature of media:

Uttered or written, muttered or scrawled, whispered or shrieked by the living to living, the meaning of abstract words in a living language cannot be fixed; by their essential nature they are persistently and insistently changing as the living language changes, consistently inconsistently growing like self-mutating viruses in living hosts who speak or write, or hear or read. The meaning of a word that’s spoken is gone, even by the time it’s heard, let alone remembered, let alone recorded in writing. I understand kama, but not the translation, not love. Only what is dead can be truly understood.5

“This construction of the self through a medium is nothing new.” (261) So, then, what is new?

Remediation sites media theorist Florian Rotzer’s textual perception of the experience of the self by

mind and body, “It is not the eyes and the ears, not the forms, sounds and words, but the collision of

bodies…that will become the primary indication of reality experience in the age of simulation.” 6 (253)

Contemporary culture offers countless ways to divide, subdivide, classify, and reclassify not only our

technology, but also our selves in an attempt to suffocate and quarantine the remediating nature of

language and relational perceptions. The invocation of digital media as a participant in an old vs. new

power struggle deadens one’s perception of the latest version of rules for the game of interplay between

humans and technology. By r/emerging the Cartesian division of mind and body that has promoted a

discursive barrier between user/tool, medium/message, and technology/culture, one can abandon the

oppositional and stagnant perception of technology and culture, and appreciate (or at the very least

acknowledge) a metacontext for any perceived context. When weighing the effects of remediation, one

needs to discern the significance between advancements of tools for the mind—technology and all of its

digital media accoutrements, and the wonders of advancements possible for the tool of the mind—

applying the fresh perspectives easily offered and exemplified by technological advancements to raise

the bar for what humans should expect from their own re/cognition.7

5 Siegel, Lee. Love in a Dead Language. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago. 2000. pg. 325.6 Rotzer, Florian. “Virtual Worlds: Fascination and Reactions.” In Simon Penny ed., Critical Issues in Electronic Media. Albany:State University of New York Press. 1995. pg 124.7 New Remediation: A Play on Terms.remediationOfRemediation.051605.v2.JenniferWallace.doc