Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A new framework for considering how all media constantly borrow from and refashion other media. Media critics remain captivated by the modernist myth of the new- they assume that digital technologies such as the World Wide Web, virtual reality, and computer graphics must divorce themselves from earlier media for a new set of aesthetic and cultural principles. In this richly illustrated study, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin offer a theory of mediation for our digital age that challenges this assumption. 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, vaudeville, and radio.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface (p. viii)
• Introduction: The Double Logic of Remediation (p. 2)
• I Theory
• 1 Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation (p. 20)
• 2 Mediation and Remediation (p. 52)
• 3 Networks of Remediation (p. 64)
• II Media
• 4 Computer Games (p. 88)
• 5 Digital Photography (p. 104)
• 6 Photorealistic Graphics (p. 114)
• 7 Digital Art (p. 132)
• 8 Film (p. 146)
• 9 Virtual Reality (p. 160)
• 10 Mediated Spaces (p. 168)
• 11 Television (p. 184)
• 12 The World Wide Web (p. 196)
• 13 Ubiquitous Computing (p. 212)
• 14 Convergence (p. 220)
• III Self
• 15 The Remediated Self (p. 230)
• 16 The Virtual Self (p. 242)
• 17 The Networked Self (p. 256)
• 18 Conclusion (p. 266)
• Glossary (p. 272)
• References (p. 276)
• Index (p. 286)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The present culture is one of remediation, insist Bolter and Grusin (both Georgia Institute of Technology). By this they mean the culture is attempting, in contradictory fashion, both to erase its media (the desire for transparent immediacy) and to multiply its media (the desire for hypermediacy). The authors point out how rapid developments in new digital media during the last decade or so--for example, the World Wide Web and virtual reality--are not the radical breaks with previous modes of visualizing, illustrating, and arranging that some media critics would have readers believe. The authors do a splendid job of showing precisely how technologies like computer games, digital photography, film television, the Web, and virtual reality all turn on the mutually constructive strategies of generating immediacy and making users hyperaware of the media themselves. In the final section--after a discussion of the theory of remediation and a careful examination of different media--the authors lay out a provocative theory of contemporary selfhood, one that draws on and modifies current notions of the "virtual" and "networked" human subject. Clearly written and not overly technical, this book will interest general readers, students, and scholars engaged with current trends in technology. All levels. M. Uebel; University of Kentucky