Remediation: current media remediates older and newer media
"It would seem, then, that all mediation is remediation. We are not claiming this as an a priori truth, but rather arguing that at this extended historical moment, all current media function as remediators and that remediation offer us a means of interpreting the work of earlier media as well. Our culture conceives of each medium or constellation of media as it responds to, redeploys, competes with, and reforms other media. In the first instance, we may think of something like a historical progression, of newer media remediating older ones and in particular of digital media remediating their predecessors. But ours is a genealogy of affiliations, not a linear history, and in this genealogy, older media can also remediate newer ones.[3] Television can and does refashion itself to resemble the World Wide Web [p.189], and film can and does incorporate and attempt to contain computer graphics within its own linear form. [p.153] No medium, it seems, can now function independently and establish its own separate and purified space of cultural meaning."
(David Bolter and Richard Grusin, 55.p, 2000)
David Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000). Mediation and Remediation. "Remediation: Understanding New Media", The MIT Press.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Metamedia at Stanford
"Metamedia ia a studio and lab that pursues research and pedagogy in design history and media materialities.
It is located online, in Stanford Archaeology Center, and has worldwide affiliates.
Metamedia combines archaeology and media, with an archaeological and long–term focus on how people get on with things, with media(works) treated as modes of engagement between people and things. Media as artifacts and prostheses as well as systems to convey meaning: we emphasize the materialities of mediation at the heart of design – the way the steel was burnished, the clay was turned, how the vessel connects makers and materials, users and contents in genealogies of containment, portage, representation ... whatever work gets done."
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
A working definition of computer-mediated communication
"A working definition of CMC that, pragmatically and in light of the rapidly changing nature of communication technologies, does not specify forms, describes it as 'the process by which people create, exchange, and perceive information using networked telecommunications systems that facilitate encoding, transmitting, and decoding messages' (December, 1996). This seems to encompass both the delivery mechanisms, derived from communication theory, and the importance of the interaction of people that the technologies and processes mediate (Naughton, 2000). It also provides for great flexibility in approaches to researching CMC, as 'studies of cmc can view this process from a variety of interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives by focusing on some combination of people, technology, processes, or effects' (December, 1996)."
(Alexander Romiszowski & Robin Mason, 2004, p.398)
1). David H. Jonassen ed. (2004). 'Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology'. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0805841458.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Software is increasingly making a difference to the constitution and production of everyday life
"The reason that a focus on Web 2.0 is significant and needed is because the popular web applications it represents are driven by users providing endless and virtually unlimited information about their everyday lives. To put it in Lash's terms, they are clearly on the inside of the everyday, they are up close, they afford direct and routine connections between people and software. We have not yet begun to think through how this personal information might be harvested and used. A starting point would be to find out how this information about everyday mundane lives is being mined, how this feeds into 'relational databases', and with what consequences: the very types of question that are being asked by the writers discussed here. Alongside this it is also important that we consider how the information provided by users, and other 'similar' users, might affect the things they come across. If we return to Last.fm, which 'learns' users' tastes and preferences and provides them with their own taste–specific online radio station, it is possible to appreciate how the music that people come across and listen to has become a consequence of algorithms. This is undoubtedly an expression of power, not of someone having power over someone else, but of the software making choices and connections in complex and unpredictable ways in order to shape the everyday experiences of the user. How we find the books that shape our writing could be a question we might ask ourselves if we wish to consider the power that algorithms exercise over us and over the formation of knowledge within our various disciplines. (I know of at least two occasions when Amazon has located a book of interest for me that has then gone on to form an important part of a published work.) This is not just about Amazon, it would also include searches on Google Scholar, the use of the bookmarking site Del.icio.us, the RSS feeds we might use, or the likely coming applications that will predict, locate and recommend research articles we might be interested in. Readers based in the UK will also by now be considering the power of algorithms to decide the allocation of research funding as the role of metrics in the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF) are finalized."
(David Beer, 996–997)
Beer, D. (2009). "Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious." New Media & Society 11(6).
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
msdm: mobile strategies of display & mediation
"paula roush is an artist–educator–curator whose interests intersect practice–based arts research with critical cultural theory, and the role of the artist–theorist in contemporary media culture. She is senior lecturer of digital photography at the London South Bank University –where she teaches courses on the archive and youth subcultures, artists publications and self–publishing practices, performativity and surveillance space. She also teaches the theory module for the MA in Art and Media practice at the University of Westminster.
In 1998, she founded, msdm, a platform for art research whose projects reveal her interest for mobile strategies of display and mediation, the convergence of network practices and daily life, and the open intersection of different media, including para–architecture, sound, video, photography, text, graphic design, installation, videogames, internet..."
(Paula Roush)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
