Remediation

Okay, so I've (obviously) been less than diligent about posting to my blog... more than a year later and here's post number 2. Sigh. I can only offer in my defense that I've been reeeeal busy. Since I began my blog, I've finished my second comprehensive exam and my dissertation proposal, presented papers at two conferences, and, more recently, accepted a position as a copyeditor for Dancecult. Those things may not sound like a lot of work on their own, but they are. Trust.

So, here's one... Marshall McLuhan's famous maxim, "the medium is the message," suggests that it is not the content of the medium which influences perception, but the medium itself that does. The analogy that most people are familiar with is that of the light bulb: devoid of content, the light bulb is pure information, and without it society would not be able to function the way it currently does; people would work shorter days in the winter and longer days in the summer, there would be little in the way of nighttime recreation, and so on. Most media aren't pure information, however, and, according to McLuhan, they tend to contain other media. For example: the content of writing is speech---> the content of speech is though--->the content of thought is abstraction--->ad. infinitum. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call this process remediation. So, what does this have to do with remixing? Remixes, like all media that we assume are not actually media, contain all the media that came before it. Remixes contain recorded music, which itself contains musical performance, which in turn contains musical ideas, which again contain abstraction. When I began formulating my thesis four years ago, I was obsessed with the idea that media contained media and I was sure there was a name for it. I likened it to that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game when I tried to explain what I was after; of course, media ecology is a very young intellectual tradition and there aren't any media ecologists at York, so no one knew what I was talking about. It wasn't until last week when I read this article by Lance Strate that I finally (finally!) found what I was looking for. So, there. Three cheers for progress!