Remediation: Understanding New Media

This book is a hard read.

This book was most enligthening, it explained in a very structured form, what it is we were doing when creating content for new medias. As Moliere said, "doing prose without knowing it", I have used my newly acquired epistemology of remediation extensively to better explain to our young designers what it is they were doing when "re-mediating" clients'content for a new media application, be it Web, Multimedia apps or art-tech.The authors are themselves professors/researchers an use a very didactical stream of thoughts which has been exceedingly usefull to me, to better convey concepts for which I had a feeling, but nowhere near the "theory of remediation" that the authors convey.As an art/tech buff, who happens to earn a living with technical content remediation and hard core applications programming, the book reconciled me with a new perpesctive on the similarities between these activities. Grusin and Bolter are challenging us to excellence in remediation whatever the final purpose.The most important concept that the authors brought to me, was that more and better remediation has often nothing to do with more technology, and much more to do with better and more effective (or intelligent) ways to communicate.In my view this book is a must reading, and a reference book for anyone producing content with a certain degree of awareness. If you believe that the new media demand a "different" attitude,this is a textbook for you.

“Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation is a book typical of its genre and time, except worse, implicitly reassuring digital humanists that ‘nothing really has changed’ while also suggesting that everything has. In order to do so, Walter Benjamin’s seminal "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is invoked only to be dismissed for encouraging a ‘utopian’ desire for unmediated reality and/or claims of either ‘a new form of democracy’ in the digital age or the alleged ‘technological determinism’ of Marxism. How conservative are these ideas? Well, I cannot speak for Grusin, but shortly after the publication of this book Bolter held a six-figure endowed chair at Georgia Tech in which he was responsible for overseeing the ‘Brittain Fellows,’ who, despite their illustrious title, were underpaid ‘full-time’ teachers. When I asked as their elected representative for better working conditions, Bolter attempted (unsuccessfully) to have me fired for spurious, unrelated reasons.”

Not well organized, arbitrary, puffed up, dense. If writing well is writing simply and clearly, this writing gets a D. The book is fraught with tautologies and contradictions not to mention simply not matching reality. It reminds me of the products of academic careerism at their worst.

I'm a student and this book is essential for the subject I am studding. If you need to better understand New Media this book will be very useful to you...