contemplating digital orality

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. The MIT Press, 2000.

The promise of push-pull media is to marry the programming experience of television with two key yearnings: navigating information and experience, and connecting to other people. (By Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, “Push” in Wired Magazine Issue 5.03 | Mar 1997).

In Chapter 14, Bolter and Grusin discuss the concept of “Convergence,” based on a 1997 article from Wired magazine, in which the editors proclaimed the end of the Web browser in favor of the new push technology formed of the convergence of existing electronic technology. The wired editors go on to suggest that the many media of cyberspace are converging as if being pulled together in a way as powerful and unavoidable as gravity. Specifically, this convergence is comprised of the telephone, television, and Internet and offers a more full bodied experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. The MIT Press, 2000.

In chapter two, the authors discuss Mediation and Remediation. They note that while hypermedia and transparent media are opposites in design, they have a common goal: to move beyond representations and attain the real. However, the real is not some objective, universal truth that applies to all and that one can uncover. “The real is defined in terms of the viewer’s experience; it is that which would evoke an immediate (and therefore authentic) emotional response” (53). So, transparent media tries to hide the fact that it is mediated, while hypermedia puts this fact up front and strives to offer the user a richer experience, thus invoking a fuller reality. Read the rest of this entry »

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. The MIT Press, 2000.

Repurposing as remediation is both what is “unique to digital worlds” and what denies the possibility of that uniqueness” (50).

In chapter one of this text, the authors discuss immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation. Fittingly, they offer the disclaimer that they make no claim that any of these three concepts are universal truths, but rather that they are practices of specific groups at specific times. Read the rest of this entry »

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1st MIT Press ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.

In this chapter, McLuhan begins by noting that movies, which for the purposes of this post only certain aspects refer also to video, merges the mechanical and the organic in a special way. On the base level, the idea of a camera (mechanical) recording something organic like the growth of a flower or the fluid movement of someone walking is such a merging. However, on a somewhat deeper level, film takes something that may not be organic and makes it seem so by presenting a sequential series of still images into a moving picture, such as making a chair walk across a room. Film also links technology with print in that they both generate fantasy in the viewer or reader. Read the rest of this entry »