New Media from Old Forms
Coined by media theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, remediation is the idea that no medium is truly new or exists in isolation. Every new medium borrows from, repurposes, and redefines its predecessors. Media history is not a series of clean breaks, but a continuous and complex process of evolution and conversation between different forms. For example, early television was a remediation of radio (adding pictures to radio formats like the variety show and sitcom) and theater (by broadcasting live plays).
The Double Logic of Remediation
Bolter and Grusin argue that remediation operates under a ‘double logic’ with two competing goals:
- Immediacy: The new medium strives to be transparent and erase its own presence, giving the user a sense of direct, unmediated access to the content. Modern video games often strive for ‘cinematic’ realism, a form of immediacy that borrows its language from the older medium of film.
- Hypermediacy: The new medium makes the user constantly aware of the medium itself, often by multiplying and juxtaposing different media forms within a single interface. A typical news website, with its mix of text, photographs, embedded videos, and interactive graphics, is a prime example of hypermediacy.
Remediation in Film
Film itself is a powerful example of remediation. Early cinema remediated the older forms of photography, the stage play, and the novel. In turn, modern films constantly remediate newer media:
- The frenetic editing and ‘bullet time’ effects in The Matrix remediate the aesthetics of video games and anime.
- Films like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World explicitly incorporate the visual language of comic books and 8-bit video games into their cinematic form.
- ‘Screenlife’ films like Searching and Unfriended remediate the computer desktop interface, telling their entire story through the windows, icons, and applications of a digital screen.