Mediation (Marxist Theory and Media Studies) - Mediation in Media Studies - Remediation

Remediation

Theorists of new media try to look at how emerging kinds of media like websites, blogs, wiki pages, and digital video both delimit the ways people can use them, and provide new avenues for the production of social relations and meanings. Picking up where McLuhan left off, theorists like Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have sought to describe the ways that new media both increase immediacy, or the mediation of our senses and experience itself, and at the same time call attention to their mediated quality by splicing together (hybridizing as McLuhan would say) different kinds of media. Thus, the logic of remediation is one of constant remix of older media forms by newer ones and vice versa. As Bolter and Grusin put it:

all mediation is remediation. We are not claiming this as an a priori truth, but rather arguing that at this extended historical moment, all current media function as remediators and that remediation offers us a means of interpreting the work of earlier media as well. Our culture conceives of each medium or constellation of media as it responds to, redeploys, competes with, and reforms other media. In the first instance, we may think of something like a historical progression, of newer media remediating older ones and in particular of digital media remediating their predecessors. But ours is a genealogy of affiliations, not a linear history, and in this genealogy, older media can also remediate newer ones. (p. 55)

Remediation, however, as the logic of mediation for social actors in light of advent of new media, is not “to suggest that all of our culture's claims of remediation are equally compelling or that we could necessarily identify all of the strategies through which digital media remediate and are remediated by their predecessors.” Thus, the “double logic of remediation can function explicitly or implicitly, and it can be restated in different ways:”

· Remediation as the mediation of mediation. Each act of mediation depends on other acts of mediation. Media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other, and this process is integral to media. Media need each other in order to function as media at all.
· Remediation as the inseparability of mediation and reality. Although Baudrillard's notion of simulation and simulacra might suggest otherwise, all mediations are themselves real. They are real as artifacts (but not as autonomous agents) in our mediated culture. Despite the fact that all media depend on other media in cycles of remediation, our culture still needs to acknowledge that all media remediate the real. Just as there is no getting rid of mediation, there is no getting rid of the real.
· Remediation as reform. The goal of remediation is to refashion or rehabilitate other media. Furthermore, because all mediations are both real and mediations of the real, remediation can also be understood as a process of reforming reality as well. (pp. 55-6)

On the cutting edge of what many are calling the new media revolution of form and content, or in other words of the mediation of experience, Bolter and Grusin are important for their insight into the ways that all media are interdependent, and the ways in which this interdependency alters the ways that reality itself is mediated by and for social actors.