David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin’s article “Remediation” delineates the notion that, increasingly, modes of mediation depict a multiplicity of forms while simulating a direct transmission of consciousness that yokes together ontological and technological perception. They suggest that the term “re-mediation” signifies this “double logic”: “Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying technologies of mediation” (2). Bolter and Grusin’s exploration of contemporary virtual reality renders how a flux of images construct both our “real” and “virtual” worlds while simultaneously noting the interchangeability of visualization and “big data.”

One example that fits into their framework of “remediation” is the virtual reality of Google Earth.  A network of cyber globes and maps, Google Earth reenacts the places and spaces of “real life”: our perception “moves” with the screen, and Google Earth imparts the illusion that the interface is indeed a place that translates the real world into the virtual world, and vice versa.

The film “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” highlights an interchangeability between virtual and actual worlds as conveyed by Google Earth. I’ve linked it here if anyone wants to watch it:

This film seems to interrogate the frightening chiasmus that haunts our current reality: the real world constructs the virtual world and the virtual world constructs the real world. Also, the ways in which the video transitions to convey a sense of hypermobility appropriates a multivalence that engages various sensory modes—aural and visual—while also blending cultural constructs. The film, thereby,  also relates aesthetic transportation to actual transportation through a visual interface: the computer interface itself–the visualization that we see–becomes transferable as an aesthetic form: yet, it is a performative form, relating and reenacting the “real” world.

Also, the temporal and spatial experiences of Google Earth are prominent: it distances the viewer from his or her current reality, transferring experience to another place; thus, the computer controls how we experience that place both in time and space. In addition, the sensation of movement that we experience also becomes a decentering, and subjective experience becomes vulnerable while we are also, paradoxically, enclosed within the safety of our own “technological device.” Therefore, the computer allows us, in a sense, to live within two worlds at once.

Finally, I want to think about the idea of “remediation,” too, through Bolter and Grusin’s final delineation of it as a “network”: “It would then be fair to say that the refashioning of a network of relationships is what defines a medium in our culture. Remediation in one dimension of media hybrids always seems both to suggest and to be suggested by remediations in other dimensions” (32). The metaphor of a network here implies not only a multiplicity of interchangeability and layering—a palimpsestic experience—but also constructs a nonlinear framework of information and knowledge.  The synthesis of surface and depth that exemplifies the symbolic realism of the interface structurally transforms representation.  Plus, the confluence of visual and  linguistic communications further emphasizes a fluctuating boundary between visual and semiotic representation.   Thereby, this further reinforces the historical connection between a person’s tools and his or her expansion of knowledge that might represent something like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of a “rhizome” which, perhaps, might look something like this:

If, indeed, remediation fosters the flexible movement of knowledge, then, it also underscores the ways in which associative thinking creates webs of knowledge. In his article “As We May Think” (1945), Dr. Vannevar Bush argues that men or women of science extend the powers of the mind through new sciences and technologies; he believes that science reinforces the need to develop relationships between the associative nature of our thinking and the sum of our knowledge.  After directing researchers and scientists to create weapons during the Second World War, Dr. Bush wrote this article to persuade scientists to make available their “bewildering storage of knowledge.” Bush uses the metaphor of what he calls a “memex” to develop the notion of the world’s first informational memory system: “a sort of mechanized private file and library” which “may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.”  http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/

Credited with the idea of the first “computer,” Bush confronts notions of technological determinism while correlating  the changing technologies of culture with the changing mores of humanity: therefore, Bush argues how we control the technology that we create.

Finally, to think about networked nodes of thinking and knowledge advocates for multimodal teaching praxis. The use of multimodal texts within the classroom simulates  real-world interactions with changing forms of knowledge while also fostering the creation of a  rhetorically-flexible mind–a mind that reads and synthesizes in various ways while also engaging in linguistic  code-switching. If our world composes forms of technology that are perpetually creating experiences of nonlinear information acquisition then it is important that our teaching methods reflect the cultural world that we live in–for ourselves and for our students.