Remediation and the Desire for Immediacy

Abstract

What is new about the so-called 'new media'? Enthusiasts often assume that digital media must break radically with the aesthetic and cultural traditions of their predecessors. However, new media and new genres are best understood by examining the ways in which they refashion or 'remediate' older forms. Computer graphics, virtual reality, and the World Wide Web define themselves by borrowing from and remediating television, film, photography and painting, as well as print. Virtual reality remediates film as well as perspective painting; digital photography remediates the analogue photograph; the World Wide Web refashions almost every previous visual and textual medium. Furthermore, older media can remediate newer ones. For example, television is making such extensive use of computer graphics that TV screens often look like pages of the web.