Remediation, Immediacy and Hypermediacy Blog

            Remediation, immediacy, and hypermediacy are key concepts that can be found in our everyday lives.  Examples of these are present everywhere, including all over the Internet.  Remediation “refers to the idea that all new media relies on one or more preceding medium, which it refashions or repurposes.  As McLuhan put it in Understanding Media, “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.  The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph” (23-24).  Now, we can still see that many new media examples draw on preceding media.  For example, online video draws on (depending on its purpose) television, telephone, and face-to-face (FtF) communication” (Time Barrow).  The remediation media that is used anew in other media is “not mainly the content, but [just] part of the form is reused in a new media form” (Mediated Memories).  Immediacy is “a process in which the medium is ‘erased’ from the experience as much as possible, in order to achieve a more ‘real’ experience” (Mediated Memories).  Hypermediacy “refers to an explicit use of mediation; the medium is expressly present in the users experience.  Differently put, immediacy is looking through a medium, while hypermediacy is looking at a medium” (Mediated Memories).

            The difference between immediacy and hypermediacy still seemed very unclear to me but when I did more research, I realized that immediacy is where “the more realistic and one angled perception is taken.  It is a very straightforward take of the image for example, photographs that are just taken in the moment” (Immediacy vs. Hypermediacy).  Hypermediacy is “where the media highlights realism for more intense experience.  An example of this would be a person playing a video game that is set in World War Two where they know it’s not real, but provides on knowing many different angles of what happened in reality” (Immediacy vs. Hypermediacy).  Immediacy and Hypermediacy can go hand in hand, therefore, “immediacy and hypermediacy are not mutually exclusive, and their constituent elements reinforce each other” (Mediated Memories).

An example of immediacy is an online video chat with another person.  This example of immediacy can be seen as a transparent immediacy.  “In this sense, a transparent interface would be one that erases itself, so that the user is no longer aware of confronting a medium, but instead stands in an immediate relationship to the contents of that medium” (Time Barrow).  This screen shot of an online video chat is a good example of immediacy because it is being captured in the moment, and when looked at takes the viewer away from being aware of the confronting medium of the actual person who they are video chatting with, and instead forces them to look at the contents of that medium but on the computer screen, which is an immediate relationship to the contents of that medium, who the actual, real, and live person they are currently chatting with.  “By the use of the video, it places the user right in front of a human conversant, including the awareness of sound, appearance, gesture, facial expression, etc” (Time Barrow).  In other words, “users want an immediate connection with the medium.  The automatic or deferred quality of computer programming promotes in the viewer a sense of immediate contact with the image” (Time Barrow).  Therefore, when one is using video to communicate with another, he or she has an equal or greater sense of this immediate contact, yet with the individual on the screen.

An example of hypermediacy is a video game.  A video game can be seen as an example because the logic of hypermediacy acknowledges multiple acts of representation, such as the characterization of multiple images, moving images, or sometimes moving observers, and makes them visible.  The goal of hypermediacy is “to be very apparent so that the user may interact with the interface.  Its raw ingredients are images, sound, text, animation and video, which can be brought together in any combination.  In hypermedia settings, the user is continually brought back to and made aware of the interface” (Time Barrow).  This screen shot of the Call of Duty: World at War video game shows how the viewer is very interactive with the medium, as it shows the controls and options that the viewer may choose in order to perform the next move in the game, and involves multiple moving images as well as animation, sound, and a storyline.

An example of remediation is a virtual museum.  The virtual museum is a remediation of a physical museum, which is in itself a remediation of other media.  The virtual museum is media that has been used anew in other media, but not using mainly the content, but only part of the form is reused in a new media form.  The content would be the actual physical parts of the museum and other aspects of it, while the parts of the forms that are reused are the structure and surroundings and other aspects of the physical museum.  The virtual museum refashions and repurposes the preceding medium, which is the physical museum, and is made up of another preexisting medium of the museum.