I’m going to start doing shorter recaps for the books and essays that feel less crucial to my understanding of what’s going on or don’t bring as much to the table. It’s no knock on the works themselves, especially as I really enjoyed reading this one. I just need to get through this faster and I don’t foresee it being as important to my exams as other works I’ve already covered.

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have one big idea in this text. It’s a little complicated but not too bad. Basically, they have a series of propositions that inform how they understand what media do and how they interact with each other. They examine this through the lens of new digital media like the web browser or VR, but it applies pretty generally across most media.

They claim that media works in two ways towards one goal. The two ways are immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy is the idea that a medium is a way to experience as closely as possible the thing represented in that medium, an idea most closely associated with point-of-view perspective in visual art forms. Hypermediacy is the idea that a medium is actually more multiplicative in ways that draw attention to the medium itself, as seen in a computer interface or television’s overwhelming combinations of different media like video and text and animation. Both of these interact with each other and are dependent upon each other, such that a medium is never wholly one or the other. Both of them are ways to get transparency, or an experience of something represented within the medium either via the act of getting closer to it or, paradoxically, further away but from many angles.

This is all tied in with their idea that remediation, or the movement of an idea or representation from one medium to another, is what mediums are. They contend that every new medium is simply the recreating and reformation of previous media in an attempt to get closer to transparency via a new combo of immediacy and hypermediacy. Its a convincing argument that they spend the majority of the middle of the book developing as they look at quite a few different media for how they remediate and employ immediacy and hypermediacy.

Their final section looks at the philosophical impact of their ideas as they develop ideas alongside Stanley Cavell and Laura Mulvey about how media position the self and incorporate their ideas of immediacy and hypermediacy into the fray. It’s all a little outside of my area of interest, but it was interesting to skim. They also push back against Marshall McLuhan’s technological determinism for its ignorance of the social and economic factors involved in the development and use of media but keep his concept of remediation and the interrelation of different media.