Remediation: Understanding New Media

J. David Bolter, Richard Grusin, Richard A. Grusin

MIT Press, 2000 - Art - 295 pages

A new framework for considering how all media constantly borrow from and refashion other media.

Media critics remain captivated by the modernist myth of the new: they assume that digital technologies such as the World Wide Web, virtual reality, and computer graphics must divorce themselves from earlier media for a new set of aesthetic and cultural principles. In this richly illustrated study, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin offer a theory of mediation for our digital age that challenges this assumption. They argue that new visual media achieve their cultural significance precisely by paying homage to, rivaling, and refashioning such earlier media as perspective painting, photography, film, and television. They call this process of refashioning "remediation," and they note that earlier media have also refashioned one another: photography remediated painting, film remediated stage production and photography, and television remediated film, vaudeville, and radio.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Ludi_Ling - LibraryThing

I would agree with the previous reviewers in their estimation of this book. It was a fascinating read, and useful inasmuch as its proposed framework is directly applicable to 'new media' today. It's ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - breadhat - LibraryThing

Written in the late 1990s, this book is little worse for wear. It lays out a highly useful and understandable framework for how media borrow from each other and situate themselves in relation to other ...

About the author

Jay David Bolter is Wesley Chair of New Media and Codirector of the Augmented Media Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of Remediation- Understanding New Media (with Richard Grusin), Windows and Mirrors- Interaction Design, Digital Art and the Myth of Transparency (with Diane Gromala), both published by the MIT Press, and other books.

Richard Grusin is Professor and Chair of English at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Remediation: Understanding New Media; Mit Press
• Authors: J. David Bolter, Richard Grusin, Richard A. Grusin
• Edition: illustrated, reprint, revised
• Publisher: MIT Press, 2000
• ISBN: 0262522799, 9780262522793
• Length: 295 pages
• Subjects: Art / Mixed Media; Computers / General; Social Science / Media Studies; Social Science / Methodology