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.