After reading Bolter and Grusin’s “Remediation,” I felt like I had read something very familiar.  I felt like this was information that I already knew, but had never had the words to explain.  I remember growing up as hip-hop moved out of its urban roots out to the suburbs.  Hip-hop artists sampled music from Rick James and Parliament and created a wholly new form of music based on the idea of spoken word narrative poetry kids like me used to call “rap music.”  This music was socially conscious as artists told stories about living on the streets, dealing with police brutality, and overcoming poverty (or living with it).  Then Vanilla Ice came along and Ninja Rap derailed all that for a while, turning hip-hop into a commercial gimmick.  The less said about that, the better.

I bring up all this because one quote in Bolter and Grusin stuck out at me: “The word remediation is used today by educators as a euphemism for the task of bringing lagging students up to an expected level of performance. The word derives ultimately from the Latin remederi–to heal, to restore to health–and we have adopted the word to express the way in which one medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another.”  I did not grow up rich by any means, but growing up on Long Island means that even the poorer school districts have access to resources that those in true poverty can only dream of.  I was in band in high school and played the baritone horn.  I didn’t have to even rent my instrument as the school let me use one during the school year.  However, those in poorer socioeconomic conditions don’t have access to those resources.  Therefore, as the science fiction writer William Gibson observes, they turned to other forms of artistic expression and the turntable, once a source of reproduction, now becomes a source of musical production.  Instead of a brass instrument, the youth of the inner city find their parents’ old Gladys Knight or James Brown records and create new music that way.  Artists like KRS-1 and Public Enemy now had an audience and MTV gave them a platform to not only make music, but to discuss social issues as well, disrupting the status quo.  Remediation in this sense happened because old media is repurposed in such a way that while we are aware of the sampling going on, the new art form is engaging nonetheless.  Of course, hip-hop may not be to everyone’s liking, but its popularity and influence is still substantial enough where one of the most recognizable celebrities on the planet is a hip-hop artist that can have a Twitter beef with our president.

Bolter and Grusin had a lot to say about remediation as reform.  Hip-hop is one example of giving voices to people of color, to the point that even those in power saw its potential and and have attempted to appropriate it for themselves.  Art is not new, but it has to be engaging.  Music is immediate in that it is engaging (sometimes for good or for bad).  I agree with Bolter and Grusin in that “[a]ny act of mediation is dependent upon another, indeed many other, acts of mediation and is therefore remediation.”  Many forms of entertainment fall into this category, but I also believe that remediation is also an equalizing force between the haves and the have-nots.  We can all have access to our shared artistic culture, finding ways to use it to speak truth to power.  The idea of remediation helps us to see that all media is interconnected and useful.