In their renowned book Remediation:
Understanding New Media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin thoroughly
spell out their concept of remediation which they define as “the representation
of one medium in another medium” (45). Though their definition appears complete
(and, at times, redundantly so) I believe that their claims appear
contradictory at times. In their
discussion of remediated mediums, they tend to fall into the same traps they
warn against. While building the scaffolding
for their concept, they also focus on digital media’s relationship to immediacy
and hypermediacy. They define immediacy
as individuals’ desire to see the contact point between “the medium and what it
represents” (30) and hypermediacy as offering “a heterogeneous space, in which
representation is conceived of not as a window on to the world, but rather as
‘windowed’ itself—with windows that open on to other representations or other
media” (34). As such, an interesting
contradiction arises between these two concepts that manifests itself in a
user’s desire to look through a medium in order to see what it represents as
well as being continually confronted with a mediation of content that makes the
medium apparent. They continue to assert
that in all remediation, the “older medium cannot be entirely effaced” (47)
though “transparency remains the goal” (46).
Within their definition, they continue to emphasize over and again the
digital medium’s desire to “erase itself” (45) so that the viewer can confront
the original medium (such as the physical desktop emulated through the computer
desktop).
While they admit that the digital medium can never truly be erased,
they seem to purport that, within those hypermediated environments, mediums and
information can erase and replace each other, an idea that seems
problematic. For example, they turn to
a discussion of hypertext and the “World Wide Web” as “our culture’s most
influential expression of hypermediacy” because “replacement is the essence of
hypertext” (43). They claim that, upon
clicking a hyperlink, the new material can “erase the previous text or graphic”
(44). This reliance on the notion of erasure seems problematic though, for
their belief that any data, page, graphic, text, etc. can be erased by new content. Perhaps this problem lies at the level of
semantics in which they simply mean temporary replacement, not physical
erasure, because, as Kirschenbaum makes evident in his essay “‘Every Contact
Leaves a Trace’: Storage, Inscription, and Computer Forensics,” digital data is
hardly as ephemeral as many believe it to be, especially in the case of navigating between pages. In this move, content is hardly lost- it is
just navigated away from. It seems to me
as if, in this instance, Bolter and Grusin must mean that mediums and material
replace each other through hyperlink navigation, not erase. To glorify the WWW as our culture’s “most
influential expression of hypermediacy” for the ability of its hyperlinks to
“erase the previous text or graphic” seems inane. To glorify this type of hypermediacy over
other mediums ignores the medium’s resemblance to the physical book, one in
which a reader can flip the page and replace
page two with page three. In
omitting this similarity by glorifying the erasing potential of the WWW, Bolter
and Grusin appear to forget their primary claims about remediation, that new
media remediates mediums that came before.
