Journal Six: Mobility

How has mobility changed writing? Or alternately, what does mobility highlight about writing that we may not have realized before?

Remediation Notes

Examples of media: painting, photography, film, television

--each medium promises to reform its predecessors by offering a more immediate or authentic experience, but this leads us to become aware of new medium as a medium; it tries to be immediate but becomes hypermediate

Oscillation b/w:

• Immediacy—transparency, a promise of transparent, perceptual immediacy, experience w/o mediation (22-23)

            -ex: desktop metaphor/interface is supposed to assimilate the computer to the physical desktop and to the materials familiar to office workers (23). Transparent interface would be one that erases itself (24)

• Hypermediacy—opacity; a visual style that privileges fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity" (31).

            -ex: interactive applications, like windows as GUI: windows opened on to a world of info made visible and almost tangible to the user; although they want this to be transparent, the nested windows and multiple representations (modes) w/I the windows compete for viewer's attn. (31). This multiplicity and heterogeneity mean that the user is repeatedly brought back into contact with the interface.

            -ex: wunderkammer (36), paintings with mirrors, maps, windows (absorbed & captured multiple media & forms in oil) (37)

In every manifestation, hypermediacy makes us aware of the medium or media and reminds us of our own desire for immediacy (34)

Networks: constituted by media technologies that are expressed in physical, social, aesthetic, and economic terms

Media technologies are agents in our culture

Although digital technologies seek immediacy, this impulse is not new: earlier media such as painting, photo, film & tv sought immediacy with similar techniques to digital tech (24)

All any new technology can do is define itself in relationship to earlier technologies of representation.

Digital technologies draw on strategies of perspective from painting and photography and interactivity/changing perspectives from film and television (28-29)

If paintbox software is intuitive, it is only because the paintbox is a culturally familiar object (Simon Penny 32)

Lanham's looking at and looking through (41): in all forms, logic of hypermediacy expresses tension bw regarding a visual space as mediate and as 'real,' i.e. beyond mediation

Hypermedia & windowed applications  replace one medium with another all the time, confronting the user with all the problem of mult representation and challenging her to consider why one medium might offer a more appropriate representation than another. (44)

Remediation: content from novels has been borrowed, but medium has not bee appropriated or quoted (44)àthe content of any medium is always another medium (McLuhan)

Medium itself is represented in another medium, defining characteristic of digital media (45)

Strategies of remediation: (45-48) remediation moves in both directions (48)

1.     older medium is highlighted and represented in digital form w/o irony or critique (paintings digitized)

2.     emphasizing difference rather than erase it: remediation w/o challenge (adding images to encyclopedia entries)

3.     aggressive: refashion older medium entirely while still marking its presence (collage)

4.     trying to absorb the old medium entirely so that discontinuities between the two are minimized (tension b/w web and tv)

5.     refashioning that occurs w/I single medium (film incorporates other film, painting incorporates another painting)

two paradoxes:

1.     hypermedia could ever be thought of as achieving the unmediated. Viewer experiences hypermedia not through extended and unified gaze, but through directing her attn her and there in brief moments; glance rather than gaze (54)

2.     just as hypermedia strive for immediacy, transparent digital technologies always end up being remediations, even as, precisely because, they appear to deny mediation (54)

all mediation is remediation: all current media function as remediators and that remediation offers us a means of interpreting the work of earlier media (look to p 55 for starred section)

each new medium is justified because it fills a lack or repairs a fault in its predecessor, because it fulfills the unkept promise of an older medium (60): in each case, inadequacy is represented as a lack of immediacy. The rhetoric of remediation favors immediacy and transparency.