Week 4 Post 2: A matter of revolution

From the arrival of the written word to the development of high speed internet access, policy and technology are closely intertwined. McChesney stresses this point. And I’d tend to agree. Regardless of whether one views these changes as productive, moral or not, I believe it’s a safe bet that all would agree that the rapid development of information technology was a hallmark of the second half of the 20th century.

Rather than rehash those conclusions, I instead would like to take this opportunity to explore a new direction. Simply put, what do those technological revelations have to do with being and communicating the human experience? I believe it is this question which drives the participation post prompt supplied by Dr. Fishman.

Our remediatons thus far have included computer games, digital photography, computer enhanced art and graphics, film and virtual reality. The World Wide Web, technically not more than a forum for these remediations, is also in practice a remediation of each of these. And, as Bolter and Grusin note, each media is a remediation of previous media.

This implies that all media are equally revolutionary and repetitious. Aristotle once said that there’s nothing new under the sun. Not much has changed in that respect. A film remediates story and photography using sound and motion picture. The photograph chemically and/or digitally remediates the painting. Video games, well, remediate whatever the designer chooses using digital art and user interface. And, yet at the same time, each is revolutionary in its own right. You cannot fly…unless in a plane or playing a video game.

In short, the technologies are not revolutionary. What becomes revolutionary is the possibility each media suggests to us individually. A photograph of an area we’ve never seen may inspire us. We begin to visualize, when seeing a beautiful sandy beach with blue sky and clear, warm ocean water, how tranquil and relaxing life must be there. But…it could be a picture outside war-torn Bosnia for all we know from a glance at the picture.

As such, I view every remediation as equally revolutionary and not.