Date: Monday, October 18, 1999, 2:18:09 PM
Subject: Remediation…
===8<==============Original message text===============
Hi All,
One of the best books that I have so far read about “new” media is Remediation by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. It is not generally available as yet and is expensive to buy. ($75) This book is bound to become one of the seminal texts in the field if it hasn’t
already. I think that one of the most refreshing aspects of this book is that it doesn’t set up the arbitrary categories of “new” vs “old” by using the dogma of the ‘new’ to probelematise and imagine hierarchies in the ‘old’. The idea of the ‘new’ is often used in ‘new’ media discourse as a vehicle to flog fringe laissez-faire rhetoric or as a vehicle for intellectual expediency. ie the hypothetical
why should we have to read all those nasty books or see those ‘linear’ films or write articles as well as produce stuff because what we are doing is so ‘new’ and radical that we can redefine the entire intellectual process or any other process in our own god-like image.
” What is a medium”
” A Medium is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real. A medium in our culture can never operate in isolation, because it must enter into relationships of respect and rivalry with other media”
P98 Remediation.