Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin offer a theory of mediation for our digital age. 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, and radio.
Bolter and Grusin offer what I believe is a perfect example of remediation on page 40-41. Here they show the front page of the USA Today from January 25, 1998 and the USA Today web site from the same day side-by-side. The web site attempts to emulate the experience of reading a printed version of the newspaper, and I must admit, they do quite a good job in this attempt. Compare that to the USA Today website today. Immediately you can see how the website has transformed itself into a new medium which is in stark contrast the the simple remediation of the past. Readers today are looking for richness in their experience. It is as much about the multimedia experience as it is about the content that they are viewing.
Television news programs on Fox News and CNN are also examples of remediation. I tried to find a photo of a typical newscast but failed to find one that illustrated my point. Take a look at Fox News Channel sometime (channel 16 on Northland Cable, haha). What you will find is the anchor in the main frame with a news ticker at the bottom and three smaller frames to the side which show the top news stories of the hour. To me, this seems like an emulation of the front page of a newspaper with the main story front and center with small snipits on the side about other tops stories from the day.
What do you think about the way online news has changed? How do you prefer to view your news? Text, video, podcast?
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