Remediation and Convergence
How new media refashion older media and how distinct media forms, industries, and content increasingly converge.
Definition
Remediation is the process by which a medium represents, incorporates, or refashions another medium; convergence is the flow of content, technologies, and industries across multiple media platforms and the cultural practices this enables.
Scope
This topic addresses the relationships between old and new media: remediation, the way new media represent and refashion prior media; and convergence, the technological, industrial, and cultural collision of formerly separate media. It draws on Bolter and Grusin's double logic of immediacy and hypermediacy and Jenkins's account of convergence culture.
Core questions
- How do new media refashion and incorporate older media?
- What is the relationship between immediacy and hypermediacy?
- How are media technologies, industries, and content converging?
- How does convergence reshape the relationship between producers and audiences?
Key concepts
- Remediation
- Immediacy and hypermediacy
- Convergence
- Transmedia
- Intermediality
Key theories
- Remediation and the double logic
- Bolter and Grusin's claim that media oscillate between the desire to erase mediation (immediacy) and the desire to multiply it (hypermediacy), with new media remediating old.
- Convergence culture
- Jenkins's argument that convergence is a cultural shift in which content flows across platforms and audiences actively participate, blurring producer and consumer roles.
- Transcoding and the logic of new media
- Manovich's account of how computational media re-encode cultural forms, allowing older media to be represented and transformed within digital systems.
History
As digital media proliferated in the late 1990s and 2000s, theorists sought to explain how new media related to old. Bolter and Grusin (1999) offered remediation as a general logic, while Jenkins (2006) named the broader cultural and industrial dynamic of convergence, both extending McLuhan's earlier observation that the content of a new medium is often an older medium.
Debates
- Newness versus continuity
- Whether digital media represent a genuine rupture or are better understood as continuous refashionings of prior media through remediation and convergence.
Key figures
- Jay David Bolter
- Richard Grusin
- Henry Jenkins
- Lev Manovich
Related topics
Seminal works
- boltergrusin1999
- jenkins2006
- manovich2001
Frequently asked questions
- What is remediation?
- It is the way one medium represents or refashions another, as when websites borrow the look of print or video games incorporate cinematic conventions.
- How does convergence differ from remediation?
- Remediation concerns how media forms refashion one another, while convergence describes the broader collision of media technologies, industries, content, and audience practices.