Remediation: Isolation and Immediacy

A medium in our culture can never operate in isolation, because it must enter into relationships of respect and rivalry with other media.  There may be or may have been cultures in which a single form of representation (perhaps painting or song [or book]) exists with little or no reference to other media.  Such isolation does not seem possible for us today, when we cannot even recognize the representational power of a medium except with reference to other media (98).

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Print.

Remediation by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin is a little outdated, but many of the ideas presented are pertinent to my research.  These ideas link back to my previous post "You Can't Read In Isolation".

The power that all of these various mediums of communication have generated has competed with the power of the press.  We are no longer in the "Age of the Press".  We belong to the "Age of Media".  

These different mediums have added layers upon layers to our sense of reality.  Bolter and Grusin address the idea that this has, in turn, increased our sense of need for immediacy.  Each layer adds to our immediate perception of a work of literature, and by default, our perception of any given medium.  A blogger put it this way:  "Immediacy is the idea that the viewer desires the medium to be transparent, or that the mode of representation should disappear entirely when viewing the subject."

She goes on to talk about how these mediums are not replacing print, but are enhancing it:  "This is not to say that the old media will disappear, but it will take on new forms to adapt to the demands of the new technologies available to it...Print is still valuable and needed in new media, but it takes on a different representation and a different vehicle of communication when it is incorporated into other modes." 

This is my main argument here.  The past mediums that society has been functioning with are no longer all that is available.  Nor do they have the ability any longer to work separate from the new technologies that have advanced.  The way we perceive and experience literature has changed and adapted to work with the new mediums.  It is not separate from them.  They all have come to work as primary texts, in a given circumstance.  They all operate on the same solar system plane, if you will, with an adaptable center of gravity (post).

Victor Hugo said "This will kill that."  That hasn't been the case, however.  Sure, literature has been kicked off its omnipotent pedestal as the embodiment of all human thought, expression, and emotion, but it has landed into a web that incorporates of all these other mediums that enhance and expand our virtual experience.