Remediation

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. This text offers a theory of mediation for our digital age that challenges this assumption. They argue that visual media achieve their cultural significance precisely by paying homage to, rivaling, and refashioning such...
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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. This text offers a theory of mediation for our digital age that challenges this assumption. They argue that 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 remidiated painting, film remediated stage production and photography, and television remediated film, vaudeville and radio.