Remediation

Remediation is an interesting concept and one that is so natural. In order to make a new medium accessible, one often must incorporate the old medium. It made sense to me when Bolter & Gruisin provided the example at the beginning of the first chapter of Renaissance paintings, to photographs, to motion pictures. We can even expand their example past the Renaissance to include cave paintings and hieroglyphics and then past film to include graphic designs and special effects created through computer software.

Remediation of books has been taking place for almost as long as pictures. I just recently saw the Book of Kells which was written on calfskin, so one could argue that books became remediated when paper was invented. Then the paperback book was designed, though it didn't make hardback books obsolete. Then the stories were recorded on records, cassette tapes (and maybe even 8-track tapes, though I don't remember), and CDs. Now we can read e-books on our PDAs or online. We can even download audiobooks from the internet to our MP3 players. But still, traditional books have not become outdated. We just have more options of how we want to "read" them.