Blame the Media

I liked Ryan’s description of Bolter and Grusin’s concept of “remediation as ‘the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms” (31).  For Bolter and Grusin, “Every medium …is developed as an attempt to remediate the deficiencies of another medium.  Remediation is this ‘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 to function as media at all” (31).  Looking at mediation this way shows the succession of media forms as a natural process in the development of media as well as a key feature of media itself.  Instead of newer media crushing older forms, these different forms of media co-exist, influence, and can possibly enrich each other.  The written word did not completely abolish the spoken word.  The written word wasn’t eradicated by the printed word.  The printed word survived its electronic/telegraphic transmission.  The radio star was not killed by video.  The internet has yet to destroy television, and I’m sure whatever is supposed to come next will fail to completely render the internet obsolete.

Digital media actually provides a new way of looking at its predecessors. According to Ryan, newer media forms provided “not only brand-new artistic media and modes of communications to investigate …but also old media to revisit.  These old media did not live in a digital environment, but, as they began to use the computer as a mode of production, they were able to achieve entirely new effects …virtually every ‘old medium’ has a new, digital twin” (30).  The digital incarnation of older media types allowed different approaches to these media, and brought the potential to breathe new life into them.  This sounds much more reasonable than “media form 1 is going to completely destroy media form 2! I am excited/upset because I didn’t really care for/really liked/based my career on/went to graduate school to study media form 2!”

Although this alleviates the doom-and-gloom view of emerging media forms, I still have to admit my bias towards print media’s style of narrativity.  I can’t help but think of cable news/online news outlets and new media when Ryan notes “the coverage of a time-consuming crisis must begin before the crisis is resolved, and the daily reports lack the completeness and retrospective perspective of other types of narrative.  All these characteristics suggest that newpapers indeed support a distinct type of narrativity” (18).  Newspapers and other forms of print media lag behind the newer forms of electronic media because they are not as instantaneous, up-to-the-current-second bursts of information.  The slowed pace/delayed delivery allows print media to give context to and perspective on new information.  Print media also demands solitary/isolated reading and attention.  It’s hard to multitask when reading a book.  Sure, you can stop reading and do something else, but the activities remain separate.  Who hasn’t changed channels (to see what else may be on) while watching a TV show, opened a new tab or browser window while something was loading, or checked their email/facebook/twitter in the middle of composing a blog post?