Remediation and a few detours

In “Remediation,” Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin identify two factors of media production that often seem to be at odds: immediacy describes the erasure of the tools and the interface that users interact with, while hypermediacy makes that same interface more obvious, more overt, due to the desire for more and more forms of media to be brought up to speed. These elements are then brought into play through remediation—the transfer of content from one form of media into another.¹

As I thought about interesting examples of remediation, I kept coming to ridiculous rabbit trails, and the examples I found most interesting were the most ridiculous. But I read Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure over break, and one of the most interesting takeaways from that text is his advice to choose materials for study that might not be taken seriously: “Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours.”² Following Halberstam’s advice, I’ll proceed by introducing the star of my remediation study: Miranda Sings.

Miranda Sings is a fictional character created by Colleen Ballinger. In 2008, Ballinger first began uploading videos of her Miranda character to YouTube. In these videos, Miranda Sings—a self-proclaimed “singer, dancer, actor, model, magician”—showcases her many “talents” on her quest for fame. After the success of her YouTube series, Ballinger began performing in front of live audiences around the world. She took to other online platforms, like Twitter, before writing a bestselling book titled Selp Helf in 2015. In 2016, Ballinger created and starred in the Netflix series Haters Back Off, which ran two seasons. I consider this an example of remediation as the content has remained largely the same throughout these jumps to new media, as seen below.

One of the most memorable examples of this remediation is in the repeated way that Miranda Sings obsesses over strange foods (like Slurpees and Spaghetti-Os)—a bit that is reproduced across media. In a video posted in 2013, Miranda decides to take a Slurpee bath; in 2017, during the first episode of Haters Back Off, season 2, Miranda takes a bath in Spaghetti-Os. She then refers to these experiences across every platform, including her book.

Perhaps in a way to maintain a focus on the overall brand that Miranda Sings represents, Ballinger frequently points to ways in which the content on these different platforms are interconnected. Her book, for example, includes links to exclusive videos online while also previewing new information about Miranda that will be revealed on the Netflix show (like the dynamics of Miranda’s family, which had been largely ignored in the YouTube videos). These connections, in turn, are mentioned by Colleen Ballinger on one of the videos she uploaded to her own YouTube channel. These connections seem different, however, from the simple tie-ins that are also common enough across the various platforms (for example, Ballinger frequently refers viewers/readers to the Miranda Sings merchandise site).

One element that is particularly noteworthy is that, while the boundaries between these different forms of media are blurred, they also prioritize immediacy to different extents, depending on the form of media. The YouTube videos, for example, contain explicitly poor editing as part of the videos’ humor. The production of the Netflix series, however, is much better as the narrative of the episodes is usually much larger than Miranda simply filming herself in her bedroom. Perhaps the most enlightening aspect of this case study then is how different forms of remediation require either immediacy or hypermediacy to be emphasized or downplayed at different times.