McLuhan and Bolter & Grusin

Bolter and Grusin’s article Remediation assumes that digital technologies such as virtual reality, computer graphics, and the World Wide Web must separate themselves from previous media. This would allow each technology to obtain new visual and cultural standards. Their theory of mediation challenges this statement.

Both Bolter and Grusin argue that today’s visual media attains their importance by understanding and changing earlier media such as photography, painting, and films. This is the process which they Remediation. Bolter and Grusin claim, “to understand immediacy in computer graphics, it is important to keep in mind the ways in which painting, photography, film, and television have sought to satisfy this same desire. These earlier media sought immediacy through the interplay of the aesthetic value of transparency with techniques of linear perspective, erasure, and automaticity, all of which are strategies also at work in digital technology” (24).

It is argued, that the purpose of media is to “transfer sense experiences from one person to another” (3). This is true, except the fact that new technologies threaten to make all media obsolete. Digital technologies are quickly becoming greater than our cultural or educational institutions can keep up with them. Erasing media in the act of multiplying them is where remediation takes place.

The discussion on theory examines the process of remediation in contemporary media, as well as places the concept of remediation within the traditions of recent literary and culture theory. Immediacy and hypermediacy play a large role in recreating new and old media.

For example, television strives to be up to the minute. New producers create photos, graphics, and ribbons of text to obtain immediacy. All media strives for immediacy. All mediums “seek to put the viewer in the same space as the objects viewed” (11). Different mediums are different in several ways, but all attempt to achieve immediacy by ignoring the presence of medium and the act of mediation. Bolter and Grusin state how important it is that media is surpassing other technologies in order to make the world present and that virtual reality overcomes the history of media.

It is stated, “photography and cinema…are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism” (26). This apparently was not true. They did not satisfy our need for immediacy. Computer graphics has become the latest expression of achieving immediacy, and owes something to earlier traditions.

Like immediacy, hypermediacy also has history and importance in media. The World Wide Web seems to be our culture’s most significant expression of hypermediacy. Hypermediacy has a “fascination with media or mediation can be found in such diverse forms as medieval illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance altarpieces, Dutch painting…” (34).

Immediacy and hypermediacy attempt to go further than representation and into the “real”.
“The medium is the message” is a phrase created by Marshall McLuhan. He believes that the medium is the message. McLuhan considers a relationship in which medium influences how the message is perceived. For example, the light bulb, which creates an environment just by its presence. “It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action” (9).

According to McLuhan, there are two types of media, hot and cold. The hot media are the ones that have a large influence on humans and even posses a “disruptive impact” (24). This is due to the “hot medium is one that extends one single sense in high definition” (23). This is the state of being well filled with data. As opposed to cold media, which have small influence on humans. This is due to the fact that little detail and information is offered, making it more interactive. I believe this is true. With movies and photographs, everything is laid out right in front of us. They are low in participation as opposed to cold media such as the telephone or cartoons. This requires high participation and like McLuhan states, “completion by the audience”.

Media has several different forms. I believe media to be a form of communication that stores and delivers information. After reading the Bolter and Grusin article, as well as Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, media seems to be an extension of past forms shaped to provide an experience for humans. Whether it is from one person to another or from a device to a human, media is forever shaping the world we live in and quickly becoming more and more advanced. Both new media and old media strive for immediacy. It is imperative to understand that new media has been shaped from past forms of mediums such as photography, film, television, and art. Each type of medium has a different affect on each human being and their culture.