The Railroad Society

The Railroad Society

On May 10, 1869, the driving of the Golden Spike was the final event in the quest to open the western United States to travel and commerce. It was the culmination of the creation of a network of rail systems that would connect the country from coast to coast. The poster advertising the opening of the transcontinental railroad was a persuasive delight created to invite the public to the joys of rail travel: “Great Event!”—“ATLANTIC TO THE PACIFIC”—“GRAND OPENING”—“OMAHA THROUGH TO SAN FRANCISCO IN LESS THAN FOUR DAYS”—“AVOIDING THE DANGERS OF THE SEA!”—“LUXURIOUS…” The poster is what the authors Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, from their book Remediation: Understanding New Media, define as a remediation: “one medium…represented in another medium. (45)” This poster remediates advertisements for Wild Bill Cody’s Wild West Shows, wanted posters of criminals, product advertisements, newspapers, land grant advertisements—to name a few. It is most notably a remediation of the American Flag because it is printed in the patriotic colors of red, white and blue. The poster creates a feeling of immediacy in that there are no photos or drawings to distract from the written words.

The railroad offered the dream that people, freight, mail, money, and livestock could all be transported across the country in half the time it would take by steamboat or canal—to say nothing of the time consumed in ocean travel. If these goods and services were seeing newly expanded markets in less time then it is easy to calculate that the speed and distance that information could travel had increased as well. The mail would be delivered much more efficiently and to many more locales. The transfer of monies would speed up and expand the growth of a capitalist society in these newly tended lands.

In an excerpt from Frank Webster’s book, Theories of the Information Society, Manuel Castell’s posits the theory of the “Network Society” in relation to the internet’s effect on the modern world. The railroad systems of the United States can be seen as a precursor to this idea. The railroad functioned in the same manner as the internet in that it was a hub of commerce and with Castell’s notion of “Timeless Time” (in the form of Skype or any other virtual video chat program) it had the ability to transport people—albeit in a three dimensional form rather than the internet’s two dimensional form. Castell relates that the internet created “…the coalescence of capitalism and the ‘information revolution’(102)”—which can also be said to have been true of the railroad. The ability to participate in the network of railroads was certainly dependent on one’s ability to pay. ‘Pullmans’ Palaces’ were the luxury sleeping quarters for those who could afford them and the dining cars fed the affluent. The railroad had the ability to capitalize the travel experience both internally and externally, thus increasing its ability to create profits.

Corporations could use the rail systems to respond to the expanding and changing needs of the burgeoning society: proximity to the network meant prosperity. Towns were expanded or built around rail hubs and extensions of the rail system were built to feed the needs of existing metropolises, such as those listed on the poster: Omaha, Denver, Santa Fe, and San Francisco.

The completion of the trans-continental railroad directly invites, as Jurgen Habermas informs, “the bourgeois public sphere…private people come together as a public…” to participate in the newly formed network of rails (27). Travel by railroad is a deliberate act by the customer. If travel or commerce in this manner were appealing and cost effective then the public good would be served while creating an environment for capitalism to flourish and expand. 

Public opinion is created in the public sphere and the construction of the transcontinental railroad was a popular idea. Stephen Ambrose, in his book Nothing Like It In The World, recalls that, “People wanted a transcontinental railroad…to bind the country together…More than the steamboat, more than anything else, the railroads were the harbinger of the future, and the future was the industrial revolution. (24-25)” The Civil War was fresh in the minds of all Americans but so too was the residual effect of the ability of a few men to mobilize the many workers—former soldiers and new immigrants—believing in their ability to move mountains and accomplish this seemingly impossible task. Public support was overwhelming—with the exception of the Native Americans and some landholders who were excluded from the process. The railroad was built with free labor not government pressgangs.

The desire for national connection, facilitated by the private sphere to benefit their interests as well as the interests and desires of the public sphere, was the driving force behind this vast network of rails.

 Works Cited

Ambrose, Stephen E. Nothing Like It in the World. New York: Simon & Schuster. 2000.

Print.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media.

Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 1999. Print.

Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge,

Mass: MIT Press. 1991. Print.

Webster, Frank. Theories of the Information Society. New York: Routledge. 2002. Print.

Remediation, Hyper-mediacy, and Immediacy Abounds

Video Games: Madden NFL 13 is one of the most popular video games in the world. The players of the video game become the football players in the video game. The appeal is in the transference of average person into superior athlete, from mere mortal to immortal. It is a remediation of many elements: the players (real or video) athletic past, the viewing of past games, the experience of being a coach or an owner, if played on line it remediates play and the group experience as well as the remediation of dreams.

This is a quote form the Madden NFL 13 website, “With Physics You Can Feel, Madden NFL 13 delivers Next Generation gameplay today. Powered by the all-new Infinity Engine, true player impact and authentic momentum transfer ensure that no two plays ever look or feel the same.” The video game is trying with all it’s might to give the player a virtual reality experience with out leaving home. The platforms on which the game is played—television, computer, ipad, facebook, and the phone—are remediation of the pinball machine, the television and, the computer.

The hyper-mediation manifests itself in the copious amount of statistics that will appear on the screen. It also hyper-mediates in the respect that you can trade, buy and sell players to improve your team. A virtual draft occurs with multiple choices of how to improve your ability to win and to potentially enhance the future of your team.

The immediacy happens in the playing of the game. This is where the video player can become totally immersed in the action and forget for a short time that this is not reality.

Social Media: Facebook is simply remediating the letter, the phone call, coffee with a friend, boring episodes of looking at the photo albums of a trips your friends took, nonsense conversations you had to listen to because the person speaking nonsense was next to you, the family reunion or any other social gathering that you attended, a politically motivated/unsolicited phone call, a wedding, party, a funeral, television, video game platforms and it also remediates loneliness.

It is hyper-mediated by advertising, the bossy friend telling you all of these “nice” people you should be friends with and the causes you should join.

The photos create the immediacy. While researching this I kept finding myself getting dragged down memory lane and well as snooping into the lives of my friends. I forgot I was supposed to be working…damn you facebook!

Movie: Facebook the movie is a remediation of Facebook. The commercials before the movie hyper-mediated me. Being drawn into the story of the movie caused immediacy. 

Remediate, Reuse, Recycle: It’s The Product, It’s the Product, It’s the Product.

Remediate, Reuse, Recycle: It’s The Product, It’s the Product, It’s the Product.

After reading Jay David Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s enlightening book, Remediation, Understanding New Media, I am disturbed at the lack of original ideas that are passed off as art and commerce. It is not that I am against remediation; it is more that I was not aware of the extent to which I am exposed to recycled media everyday.

I only thought of remediation in terms of movies and television constantly reusing novels and television programs to makes multiple versions of the same movie. I lived under the naive idea that artistic endeavors should be fresh. From an artistic viewpoint remediated content is boring: from a business viewpoint, though, it could not be more exciting. The ability to resell a product over and over is capitalistic fission. It certainly fuels a major sector of the global economy and it attracts the uninitiated to the repurposed content.

The personal computer is perhaps the most powerful of all the remediation platforms. It can connect the user to the history of the known world instantly and constantly. No more waiting in line to see the Mona Lisa, she will come to you in whatever form you can imagine: a print, a coffee cup, a calendar, a bookmark to mark the page in the art book on the history of the Mona Lisa—the list is endless—and not necessarily negative. Bolter and Grusin quote Fredric Jameson, “

It is because we have had to learn that culture today is a matter of media that we have finally begun to get it through our heads that culture was always that, and that the older forms or genres, or indeed the older spiritual exercises and meditations, thoughts and expressions, were also in their very different ways media products. The intervention of the machine, the mechanization of culture, and the mediation of culture by the Consciousness Industry are now everywhere the case, and perhaps it might be interesting to explore the possibility that they were always the case throughout human history, and within even the radical difference of older, precapitalist modes of production. (Remediation, 56-57)

The idea of remediation is to satisfy desire at will. The downside to this constant “feeding at the trough” is the glut of empty calories that remediation produces. I have seen the Mona Lisa and I can say without question that there is a power and a mystique in viewing the original in person. Something happens, which cannot be properly explained, that can never be experienced in an image on a coffee cup or a calendar. The power of exposure that remediation of an image or information can generate is vast but the cost is in the reduction of the brilliant image or idea into a pedestrian experience.

I must confess, I like to be able to access media at will but I would like to think that I would not trade the ability to discover that which is new for the easy access to information. Remediation is convenient: discovery is exciting—the choice belongs to the individual.