Remediating Identities

 In Remediation, Bolter and Grusin write:  

“This is the claim implicit in most cultural studies analyses of popular media: that film and television embody or carry economic and cultural ideologies and that we should study media principally in order to uncover and learn to resist their ideologies (Kellner, 1995).  Although it is true that the formal qualities of the medium reflect their social and economic significance, it is equally true that the social and economic aspects reflect the formal or technical qualities” (67-8).

To understand this conclusion, we first must accept Bolter and Grusin's theory of the reflexive nature of the relationship between older and newer media.  Specifically, newer media contain vestiges of older media, re-forming them in order capitalize on audiences' existing attraction to them as well as their desire for something more immediate, an improvement upon the sense of immediacy provided.  This relationship is reflexive, though, because older media are just as capable, and in order to stay relevant, just as likely to remediate newer media.  The result is a dialectic of remediation which blurs the lines between older and newer media.  The above quote is an extrapolation of this theory of reflexivity to apply to the relationship between media and identity.  

Here's an example: 

The image constitutes the cover of an older medium: the ink and paper magazine.  This older medium remediates the even older medium of written language by juxtaposing it in a hypermediated way with the medium of "realistic" photography.  The remediations don't stop there, however, as the reflexive relationship of remediation is pronounced by the language of the text: "Life is a series of reboots."  Here, the older media of written language and paper magazines remediates the language of computer technology.  

In line with the notion that media contain social and economic significance, this remediation of the language of newer media functions as a remediation of the real.  By reframing "life" in the context of computer speak, the creative forces behind this image imply an intrinsic connection between our immediate experience and computer technology.  Our sense of ourselves in  the "real" world is shaped by this association, and it is hard not to proceed from there to the idea that we are then more inclined to further understand ourselves in relation to computer technology and other "newer" media. 

Although Bolter and Grusin seem to almost defend the innocence of media by suggesting an equality between media shaping and being shaped by culture, this reflexivity is all the more reason why culture and media should be analyzed together.  There is no need to blame media for shaping culture any more than there is a need to blame culture for its media, but using the material evidence of media--both what it represents and what message that representation sends--we can better understand how and why our culture functions as it does.

As the above image illustrates, there is a valuation of newer media as more related to our lives today than older media, and this valuation appeals to the sophistication of users of newer media to get them to use this older media.  The reverse is also possible: users of older media (e.g. magazine readers) gain a sense of authenticity in the hypermediacy of realizing they recognize a technological reference--they are more technologically savvy than they might have thought.  Either way, the attraction of newer media is valued even in an effort to protect the value of older media, and this is indicative of both a representation and the further shaping of contemporary cultural values. 

Bolter, David J. and Richard Grusin.  Remediation: Understanding New Media.  Cambridge:

MIT, 2000.  Print.