Remediation and hypermediation can be seen as two mechanisms through which content is transformed when moving around media and also as instantiations of intermediality and convergence. Broadly speaking, remediation is “the representation of one medium in another” (Bolter and Grusin 45). Despite Bolter’s and Grusin’s characterization of remediation as a representation, I wish to see it as a reshaping or refashioning of media, which, incidentally, might come in the form of representation. This way, I link
another media responding to a larger cultural problem, and to Meikle’s and Young’s dynamic of contestation and continuation. Angela Ndalianis explains remediation as a way in which:
new media always retain a connection with past forms. Like painting, architecture, and sculpture, which have longer history of traditions to draw upon, contemporary media such as the cinema, computer games, and the internet “remediate” or refashion prior media forms, adapting them to their media-specific, formal and cultural needs” (6).
More succinctly, for Katherine Hayles, remediation is “the cycling of different media through one another” (Machines 5). Remediation does not pertain only to digital media and can, undoubtedly, be found in art and narrative of all times: paintings of a map, a book, or a sculpture are already forms of remediation. Nevertheless, the processes entailed in convergent texts constitute distinct forms of remediation, and perhaps more recurrent ones, especially those afforded by the capabilities of digital media, for instance: a computer screen made to look like a print magazine and imitating some of its
particularities like the turning of pages, the rasping sound of paper, and so forth.
Remediation is easy to picture when it deals with a visual representation of one medium in another, or when it rehearses material metaphors like the paper page look in e-readers, or the brushstroke effect in image manipulation software. More nuanced forms of
remediation are those affecting narrative and narrative genres. This can be seen, for example, in oral literature, as literature written to remediate the sounds and rhythms of oral narratives. Likewise, new forms of narrative taking place in digital media exhibit their relation to print literature, examples of this are: blognovels refashioning installment novels, text message and email narratives proposed as the new epistolary novels, and so on. The intertwining of the three layers of medium in these examples is so tight that a modification of one will have an effect on the others. As Bolter and Grusin sustain, there are “close ties between the formal and material characteristics of media, their ‘content’, and their economic and social functions” (67). Therefore, if the form of a literary text or genre is altered in any way because of its rendering (creation and distribution) on digital media, its content and its reception will also be impacted. As Littau states, “[n]ew media invent not just new forms of fictions, but also new means of perceptual manipulation. As
such they present audiences with new opportunities for experiencing fictional worlds” (Reading 7). Simultaneously, as Ndalianis points out, the process of remediation always keeps the connection between the new and the old whether it is acknowledged or not. Embedded in its technical ensamble, how a medium is perceived changes with time. New digital media, Bolter and Grusin say, “oscillate between immediacy and hypermediacy, between transparency and opacity” (18). Through both, immediacy and hypermediacy, media aim to provide an authentic experience of what is being represented to the viewer, spectator or reader: “[h]ypermedia and transparent media are opposite manifestations of the same aim: the desire to get past the limits of representation and to achieve the real… [T]he real is defined in terms of the viewers experience; it is that which would evoke an immediate (and therefore more authentic) emotional response” (53). It is impossible not to talk about the real when discussing representation and authentic experience, but the authors, and I along with them, are quick to clarify that the real is not thought of
metaphysically, but in the sense that “all mediations are themselves real. They are real as artifacts (but not as autonomous agents) in our mediated culture” (53). In this dynamic, hypermediacy makes a medium evident as a mediating platform that does not give immediate access to the real object being represented; on the contrary, immediacy makes a medium seem like it is portraying reality without mediation. Additionally, media that originally seemed to provide an authentic unmediated experience might lose some of that transparency. Conversely, media trying to grant an immediate experience in regard to the object represented can seem, at first, too artificial. Drawing on my argument in the previous chapter, hypermediation – just like metarepresentation – entails the recognition of a representation as a representation and becomes the site where we engage in the negotiation between different levels of (mediated) reality.
In the process of remediation, the very existence of the medium comes to the forefront given that representing one medium in another implies a refashioning or a reformulation of it. While immediacy seeks to erase the medium and offer the viewer nothing but the represented object, hypermediacy seeks “to make the viewer acknowledge the medium as a medium and to delight in that acknowledgment” (Bolter and Grusin 41). Remediation, then, constitutes the process through which one medium highlights, refashions or absorbs
previous media in a relationship of continuation and contestation, as Miekle and Young suggest. The constant movement and innovation seen nowadays in digital media has proved fertile ground for these processes to unfold rapidly. Nevertheless,
introducing a new media technology does not mean simply inventing new hardware and software, but rather fashioning (or refashioning) [a physical, social, aesthetic and economic] network. New digital media are not external agents that come to disrupt an unsuspecting culture. They emerge from within cultural contexts, and they refashion other media, which are embedded in the same or similar contexts. (Bolter and Grusin 19) Again, the refashioning proposed by Bolter and Grusin echo the idea of human-
technology co-evolution, previously discussed. Remediation, because it is based on the double logic of immediacy and hypermediacy is dependent on current cultural contexts that is, what might have been considered immediate at some point in history, can now seem hypermediated. This change of perspective, in turn, calls for a refashioning to reinstate the sense of authentic experience and address or help solve a recurrent problem. As those cultural contexts change we respond with new media forms that will continue to provide seemingly closer, more immediate experiences.
Although Bolter and Grusin focus mainly on painting, photography, television, and film, very similar phenomena can be observed in narrative production. It would seem that narrative had not changed medium until the digital age, having inhabited the print book medium for so long. This is certainly not the case if we consider oral literature, film, and theater adaptations as forms of remediation. Even representations within the same medium, like a text within another one (framed narratives, for example), can be viewed as a case of remediation recurrent in literary narrative (49). Forms of remediation in this sense could be seen in intertextual strategies where one text can be found in another, i.e., the presence of Madame Bovary in Woody Allen’s “Kugelma’s Episode” or the extreme example of Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard, escritor del Quijote”. Even the recurrence of certain stories like the Faust myth in several versions could be taken as instances of remediation.
Metafiction, I want to propose, is an instance of hypermediated narrative, exhibiting the very fictional status of the story as it comes into being and occupies its textual, visual, or
otherwise medium. In media convergence, metafiction is constituted by its media components. The conventional processes of creating, narrating, reading, and fiction making are made evident in the media that make up a story’s convergent and intermedial materiality. What I am proposing is to draw a connection between hypermediation in metafiction with my previous argument regarding metarepresentation. As argued before, in metafiction, the representation of other writings, creations, books, and artifacts
together with the construction of several narrated worlds highlight the existence of the different levels of reality and the need to negotiate between them. In media convergence, metafiction highlights the different media used in the construction of the narrated world, and the attempt to provide a more immediate access to the narrated world evidences its very making. The more intricate the interplay among the represented media, the more evident the way in which they have been incorporated in the narrative as various instances of the narrated world. In other words, distinct media instantiations in media convergence metafiction stand also for distinct levels of reality. Navigating
hypermediated narratives is not dissimilar to navigating different levels of reality like we do through metarepresentation. Indeed, it is also through this cognitive mechanism that we assign a location to each medium within the narrative, its roles, and its relation to our here-and-how, and to a story at large. In other words, hypermediation outlines the path whereby we keep track of the different nested levels of reality in metafiction as proposed by various media.
Complementing my definition of metafiction from the previous chapter, I now add that, in the context of media convergence, it operates on the basis of hypermediation. There is an acknowledgement of the mediation of the story and, along with it, an overt
consciousness of the distinct instances of the narrated world. Media convergence, because it functions on several platforms simultaneously, provides a stage for hypermediation and metarepresentation to establish the narrative connections and
disconnections between the elements constituting a story. Readers not only navigate these elements, they also witness their interrrelations. Certainly, this is a consequence of
interactivity and networkedness, but that does not mean that all digital narratives, or all instances of electronic literature share the same characteristics. What, then, distinguishes
a convergent narrative, like interstory, from other instances of literature and narrative done on digital media?