"Remediation" Discussion

Questions resulting from the Bolter & Grusin readings:

“…one of the most popular genres of computer games is the flight simulator (fig. 1.9). The action unfolds in real time, as the player is required to monitor the instruments and fly the plane. The game promises to show the player "what it is like to be" a pilot, and yet in what does the immediacy of the experience consist? As in a real plane, the simulated cockpit is full of dials to read and switches to flip. As in a real plane, the experience of the game is that of working an interface, so that the immediacy of this experience is pure hypermediacy.” (“Introduction”, pg 11)

This is often presented in society as gaining a ‘real-life’ experience but if the experience is based on hypermediacy, isn’t it just a false front based on imitation?

Should we continue to invest time (not to mention money) in this abstract system for students and society as whole to gain ‘experience’? Are we heavily relying too much on this advancing technology?

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Bolter and Grusin set up a great outline of remediation in (“Immediacy”, pg 44). This desire of continuous technological development is relentless (or so we’re always told) so the purpose of remediation is to have more media technologies build upon, take from or completely absorb preceding media constructs.

Since forces outside of our own lives (corporations, technology gurus, etc.) are the ones advancing these new media technologies – how do we personally assess that they are a better alternative to the prior?

Also, as Bolter and Grusin point out, it presents a problem to the consumer of“ multiple representations” (44). How should society (besides technology and the mass media telling us) sort out these multiple representations?

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“New digital media oscillate between immediacy and hypermediacy, between transparency and opacity. This oscillation is the key to understanding how a medium refashions its predecessors and other contemporary media. Although each medium promises to reform its predecessors by offering a more immediate or authentic experience, the promise of reform inevitably leads us to become aware of the new medium as a medium. Thus, immediacy leads to hypermediacy.” (“Introduction”, pg 1)

If true medium transparency is the goal to gain this authentic experience, isn’t the visceral/physical realm of the human experience with a medium always going to be present – thus an ‘obstacle’? or not?