Remediation. Turning something into a mediated content. Richard Grusin, a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, wrote an essay explaining what remediation is and what involves. He explains that, when we talk about remediation, we consider two key concepts: immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy is willing to recreate reality through the erasing of representation. To put it in other words, new media through this concept want to offer a ‘real content’ through a transparent medium. That means that when we see a movie, the usual director’s aim is to make us feel like part of the story, forgetting that we are sitting in front of a screen seeing pieces of juxtaposed frames. 80 years ago, some movies had a narrator, an external voice that guided viewers through the story. Today, if it’s not a specific effect put on purpose, the narrator’s voice is not used anymore. The computer graphic that we use is trying to seem as realistic as possible giving the viewer the digital effect that he needs to understand the message or the scene, without necessarily noticing it. Grusing quotes Leon Battista Alberti, who says: “[O]n the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen.” This metaphor summarizes the willingness within Immediacy of opening a window to a world, when the world is represented as it is, making the window disappear.

To make the medium disappear properly, however, usually, we have added mediated layers through which the content is delivered. Virtual reality, for example, gives you content with the intent of making the console, the screen, and the medium in general disappears. When we play with a videogame that recreates the experience of driving a car, while usually, I would have had my screen with a simple controller, some modern consoles offer a real driving station. In the station, I sit as I would do in a normal car, with a normal steering wheel, with the pedals, with 180° screen, with the visual of a realistic road and the audio I would hear in real life. As I play, I forget that I’m playing a game, and I might think that I am actually driving.

Another example of immediacy can be found in videocalls. I am in a long-distance relationship with a guy who lives in Como. We see each other average twice a month, and for us is very difficult to overcome our missing each other. Something that definitely helps us are videocalls. When I chat with him, I feel distant. I am communicating with him only trough a logical perspective. I am saying what I want to say, he says me what he wants to say, but I don’t know what his tone is, the context in which he is saying what he says, the emotion he feels, the moment in which he writes me, etc. Nine years ago, this would have been one of the most direct and real-time ways of communicating with someone else, but today, we want more, we want more levels. When I chat with him, he feels distant. He IS distant.

Here is where video calls came in. By adding mediated layers, the content delivered seems much nearer and more real. Through video calls I can hear him, see him, talk to him, see his expression, his reactions, hear the sounds coming through his room, or his house, I can see where he is, what he is doing, etc, and he can do the same with me. With all those added layers, we feel much nearer to each other. Sometimes, while we video call, I also lay myself in bed, hugging a pillow. If he had been in Rome recently, the pillow maintains his smell too, and I almost feel he’s there with me. More layer we have, and more connected to reality I feel, forgetting that I am actually alone in a bed, hugging a bag full of cotton while talking at a small metal black box.

Hypermediacy, on the other hand, is the concept of giving the viewer multiples windows, with multiples contents, at the same time, bringing the interface at the center of attention. While with immediacy the interface would have been transparent, here is the main center of all our interests. With hypermediated contents, we can have text, audio, images, animations, videos, all in ones. A simple example of a Hypermediated interface would be the home page of an online newspaper agency.

On the same homepage, we have an ad, breaking news, cinema advice, sports news, war videos, cooking recipes, etc. While with immediacy, the intent was letting the medium disappear and making the content seem realistic, with hypermedia the main aim is to give the audience anything they might want at the same time. The audience might want to navigate the interface for the multiplicity of content. Another example of hypermedia is children’s books. Children’s books are filled with text, images, buttons that make recorded audios to playback, fur, strange materials, smells, etc. Everything is put there to make the child who is reading interacting with everything, not only reading the book but experiencing it. According to Grusin, indeed, with multiple acts of representation, we reproduce a rich sensorium experience.

The main aim of social media is making users stay online as long as possible. They do that through the process of hypermediation. We have so many things to watch, listen, read, feel, that we might end up staying scrolling on our Instagram homepage for even three or four hours.

Social media are so hypermediated that we just keep going through one meme to another, one post to another, one video to another, for hours and hours… yup, you did it.

In the end, the aim of remediation remains the same, even if Immediacy and Hypermediacy seem the same: their main goal is to recreate an experience. On one hand, the remediation is focused on a simulation that makes the interface to disappear, making us focus on the experience; on the other, the interface browsing itself becomes the main experiences, where contents are just the main ingredients.

Digital Media are characterized by the changeability. I mean, every type of digital media can be copied, modified, changed, edited, changed in part, implemented, summarized, divided, while maintaining the original form and structure the same. I can take a picture and modified in hundreds of different ways, with hundreds of regulations and filters, and I would still be able to create other unique work while maintaining the original picture untouched.
This characteristic enabled us to change the world we live in: for example, anyone can go on Wikipedia and change the content of what is written. Or, if we do not like how we went in a picture, we could just open Photoshop and modified within 5 minutes.

Digital Media contents are modular. This means that they are fragmented into different little pieces. For example, a movie is made out of thousands of different frames and millions of different pixels. The modularity is what enables us to modify a level of a digital media content without changing the others. I just finished post-producing a cosplay picture for my boyfriend and I did it using many different layers on Photoshop. In the middle of the process I noticed that the eyes were too dark, so, with a simple adjustment layer, I was able to just brighten the eyes without modifying anything else. Also, I created different warmth filters and changed them different times choosing the one I liked the most.

Digital Media contents are variable. That means that they can be altered in many calculated ways which gives the user the feelings of being unique. For example, as Manovich says, when we enter a web page, the system is taking all different pieces that compose the web page and put them together. The process of putting together those pieces changes from person to person. Ads, for example, changes from person to person, from moment to moment, from topic to another topic, etc. Any time we enter a web page, it will be slightly different from the other times: it will be unique.

This happens also with videogames: we create our own character, we chose their face, we chose their body type, we chose their attitude, we chose their physical colors, we chose their armor and their weapons, etc. Then we play with the character and we decide to go somewhere instead of somewhere else, or we chose to complete a mission over another, and slowly we create our unique version of the story. This is only an illusion. I mean, it is real that we chose all those things and we created that specific version of the character or the story, but the videogame was previously programmed to fulfill all of your choices. You modified all the physical characteristics by using all the parameters the game gave to you, you chose to complete the missions that were active within the game, you decide to take a road programmed within the game instead of another road programmed within the game. The gamer just combined pieces that were specifically put there to be combined. In the digital world, either you are a programmer who creates originally something yours, or you are just a remixer putting together others work.

Digital Media are transcoded. When we talk about digital content, we take into consideration a computer layer and a cultural layer. The interaction between the two is called “transcoding.” For example, from a computer layer perspective, emojis are little icons that were made for the computer to symbolize a certain emotion. From a cultural layer perspective, emojis change their symbolic meaning according to the context, the moment, the nationality of the communicators, and the type of message.

This is a happy emoji that from a computer layer perspective was created to symbolize a happy face.

From a cultural layer perspective, this emoji can change meanings in different contexts:

    –Hi mum, I love you!!😁      
in a normal mother-son conversation, it could represent a simple happy face

            –Babe r u mad?
–nope 😁  
Implying that probably the couple had a moment of  miscomprehension, in this case the emojis seems to be very ironic. Probably the partner is trying to express anger, criticism, and willing to start a discussion.

  

            –Daaad, so tomorrow  can I borrow the car?😁
Let’s imply that they had a previous conversation where the son asked for the car, and the father answered that maybe he could have taken it.
Probably the son, by using this emoji is trying to influence the emotionality of his dad. The emojis represents a happy guy and destroying other’s happiness is something that goes against the human emotional need of collaboration. By showing his dad his happiness for the possible future in which he would borrow the car, by saying “no,” the dad would be destroying this happiness, making him feel bad for this.

Technology evolved enormously in the last decades, and those technical developments changed completely the way we produce, distribute and consume digital media products.

• New media are digital: according to Miller, new media are made out of algorithms, numerical codes made by 0-1, and they can be easily alternated or distributed.
• New media are networked; Today, we can consume media contents through a series of numerous medium. By having more way of consuming a product, people have more choice on what they use and on the way,  they use them.
• New media are databased. They are made on collection of data that can be storage, retrieved or filtered, and used to create meaningful information
• New media are automated. Something is automated when it can create content with previous templates without using humans. With automatization, the personalization of media became drastic. With the use of cookies for example, we agree that the system analyzes our attitude on the internet (e.g. how and what do we search, what do we write, what do we cancel, on what our sight stops the more, etc.). Automatization can occur also when we program media to do something. For example, when I open my Instagram to put some funny filters, I’m just telling a program to automatically turn the acquisition of my face into something pre-programmed that create a filter. According to Manovich, Automation is one of the principles of New Media. He says that, after repeating what Miller said, by creating automation, we can simulate reality. For example, by playing at a videogame, we play with characters that are part of the program. Those characters mimic human attitude and behavior and try to simulate what a human would do, while they are just a well programmed set of numbers. In videogames we have the illusion of being free in our choice, while, in reality, every possible choice has been calculated and programmed.

When I read about this part, I automatically thought about Bandersnatch, the interactive movie from the Netflix series “Black Mirror.” During the film, indeed, the viewer can make some choices that would influence enormously the story. The fact is that every possible choice was previously programmed and calculated. While we are watching the movie, however, we have the sensation of having personally influenced the story, even though we did nothing outside the program.

With the New Media everything is unique and personalized, but it’s not original.

New digital media differ from the old ones specifically because they are active instead of passive, according to Mark Poster. He also thinks that in media, when we talk about broadcasting, we talk about an Elite that controls and shape broadcasting. This enabled fascism and dictatorships to develop. Within new media, however, being the user more active, they can control the information they give, and they can give other information too. They have more choice, and this is what new media are about.

Lev Manovich wanted to analyze this new media; for doing this, he wrote a book through which he wants to give the world a tool to understand new media (Mapping New Media). He organized the book with ordered chapters, and each chapter would be essential to the understanding of the next one. In his opera, he analyzes what are the new media, what is the interface, what are the operations, the illusion, and the forms within. Then, during his book, he uses three main terms: language, object, representation. When he talks about ‘language’ he talks about new media in relationship to other cultures, creating a big visual culture. When he talks about ‘object,’ he talks about the new media object which could be any content originated or distributed by any media. When he talks about representation, he means everything that represents something that exists within another context. For example, a videogame could be a representation of reality. Manovich, however, underlines that any representation is necessarily biased. When we see something represented within a certain language (could be a frame, could be a text, could be a picture, etc), we do not see it from any other perspective. When we see an image of the apple, we don’t see if there were people in the room when the picture was taken. We don’t see if the photographer was naked or not. We do not see if there were other fruits outside the frame. The photographer decided to show us something within a frame. As we see in Vertov’s dataset, a cameraman Is like a surgeon. He takes and extrapolates from the world what he wants.

This is exactly what happens with political propaganda. Politicians take the picture they want, they select what to put in a frame, and the decision they take will deliver the narrative they want. Last semester, in the class of Visual Communication, the professor showed us a picture of a black child that was swimming during a flood after the Hurrican Katrina with a black sack. In the picture, we were just seeing a guy with a sack that was swimming in a flood. Nothing more. We had no other pictures, no context, no story. We had just that picture. The professor told us that right-wing politicians took advantage of this lack of information to create their narrative. They used the image under an article that said, “young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store.” The paradigmatic and syntagmatic choices the writer had changed the interpretation of the picture. The frame gave us some elements, and the politicians added their meaning, creating a very specific message. Reality and representation are two very different things, this is what Manovich wanted to say. No media could ever represent fairly reality or any other object: representation implies a narrator, and a narrator is a funnel that necessarily selects what to tell.

You are on the bus coming home after a day at university. You see a poster of the new Joker movie.

You get curious and open your laptop to watch the trailer on YouTube. At the first watch, the trailer seems very nice, so you decide to watch it again on your big smart TV as soon as you get home. At a second watch, you have the confirmation: the trailer is lit! You take your phone, go on YouTube, share the video URL, and write a post on your social media with all your hype and expectations. The next day three friends of yours meet you at lunch to talk about your post and their thoughts about the trailer and the upcoming film.

This is the Convergence culture.

While the delivery technologies are changing, the media contents are driving from one to another, and our intentions go with them. We saw, analyzed, shared our thoughts about the new Joker movie by seeing a real poster on the bus, by watching the trailer on a laptop and on a TV, by sharing a post with our thoughts from our phones, and by discussing it in real life with our friends. We used multiple mediums to share, analyze, and share the same media content. 

Henry Jenkins in his book talks about how convergence is taking multiple mediums together creating a system in which new technologies are being added to the old ones were users participate within the culture, manipulating it and enjoying it through different sources and by creating new content. The internet is full of user-generated content that remixes already existing content.

In this period, long-distance relationships are not so difficult to sustain thanks to convergence. As Jenkin says in his Introduction, a mother can kiss his son to give him goodnight when he’s at home and can text him “goodnight” when he’s on the other side of the world. The intention of the mother giving love to his son by saying goodnight is the same; the medium change within the context and the situation. Jenkins calls this, “Telecocooning,”

I started some month ago a long-distance relationship with a guy in Como. At first, we were both very against the idea of being in a long-distance relationship: I’m 21, he’s 18, and being in a long-distance relationship at this age could be very painful. However, we found it much easier than we thought. We chat all they long, we call each other, we share with pictures and video our little daily tasks and achievement, and we video call every day. Our intention of being together and enjoying moments together remains strong true different mediums. When we meat in real life, it is like nothing changed, except for the physical interaction; the intentions remained the same, just the way of communicating and the medium were different.

In this convergence culture, the universes of media content expand. With this high connection and activities possibilities, users are becoming much more active, and media industries are expanding the universes of their media content. Now, with a vertical technological expansion (it means that there are multiple different products delivered in multiple forms of the same content), I can watch a film, read the comic from which the film was inspired, play the videogame, watch the TV series correlated, buy a t-shirt of the movie, and cosplay my favorite character. Within these extensions and participatory culture, numerous brands are trying to fulfill the fans’ need to participate in the product. For example, as a cosplayer, I know that Overwatch is a videogame where the outfits of the characters were specifically ideated to be cosplayed.

In the end, users are active, they use different mediums to do what they want; they also create new content through different mediums. In this participatory culture, users that create, put together, remix original contents are all over the web. With Star Wars, for example, a sort of culture was created: in the sense that there are people that talk with star wars languages, act like star wars characters, and follow a new Jedi religion. Original contents also are all over the web; it’s strange though because George Lucas is very jealous of his creations. He wants all the rights for him, and, if some great content is published without his authorization, in theory, he could put it down, or simply ask for all the revenues on that content.

As Jenkin says in his chapter about Star Wars, however,

“The Webmasters of those sites” (sites that publish fanmade contents) “say that they deal with the official production company all the time on a range of different matters, but they have never been asked to remove what once might have been read as infringing materials.”

For instance, this is one of the most famous scenes of the first Star Wars, where the Jedi master Obi One Kenobi fights with his former apprentice and now enemy, Dart Vader.

The fight scene is sloppy, slow, unreal… it was great 40 years ago maybe… but now… ew.

A YouTube channel, FXitinPost, reimagined the scene, and with original clips from the movie and new clips made from scratch, they managed to create a phenomenal new version of this legendary duel.

In the comments, people are claiming that this should be integrated into the original film, and others even say that THIS is the canon duel, and the original one is a fan-made.

They managed to recreate something spectacular, even considered better than the original; they are only two fans that wanted to participate in the creation of something they love.

With the development of the internet new possibilities for users grew, but, sometimes, the laws and regulations around those activities were a bit behind the times. When the new era of Web 2.0 started, users started having many new ways to copy online content. During the first period of the internet, where users would take contents passively, was very difficult to copy online software or online contents: you needed a license or an official buying of the items. With the new technologies, users could copy easily everything on the internet coherent to the idea of ‘freedom of the internet.’ The problem is that around online contents, strong copyright regulations were active; if the police could prove that you copied or used online software or content without an official license, you could get sued. According to Richard Stallman, this was not fair.

Should software belong to the owners?

In his article, he shows how the Software Publishers Association (SPA) used propaganda by spreading the idea that copying online content was wrong and that you could get sued for doing so. Owners, also, would tell that they were experiencing theft claiming the contents produced by them were intellectual properties exaggerating what was happening by saying that the activity of copying was harmful to them. Stallman highlights that, differently from a material property, an online property cannot be really stolen. If I make spaghetti and you stole my spaghetti, at the end of the day I would not have eaten while you did, so you stole a property damaging me. With online contents is different; if I make a software and you copy it, at the end of the day I would have my software and you would have my software. There is no real damage. The damage the owners claim is damage that considers the actual possible revenue that they are not having for their software are being copied instead of being bought.

Is it the same concept when we consider an online content published by a user on a public platform? A youtuber I follow Nicolò Balini (aka HumanSafari) published a video where he shows that an Italian news agency used a video he made for a program without asking him the permission, without citing him, covering his youtube channel logo, his brand. He says that they used his videos multiple times, and after some phone calls, and a social online movement (his fans were upset) the news agency apologized to him live.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQNpwwua5MU

He publishes his video on public social media so, technically, there is no problem in sharing and using those contents. However, he said that he put a lot of effort with his own resources in making those videos, so it was unfair that a news agency with a big team and high budgets had used a video he made without asking nor citing him.
In the end, it is not a matter of what is legal or not, but it seems to be a matter of what seems to be fair or unfair (especially among the online community).

The Web 2.0 had controversy between what we can do practically and what we can do legally especially with the phenomenon of Hackers. In the 60s, the term was used by the MIT to describe a person good at computing, and it was connected to the good conception of someone who would use the web to find technical solutions though nonobvious means. They also believed in the values of freedom, privacy, and access. In the 80s the term was associated more to a conception of a person who uses the web through any mean, even not properly legal. Those were the underground hackers. In the late 80s, some hackers started using their capacities for illegal reasons, and the term “cracker” was created. The idea of the hacker culture was connected to humor. Hackers were leaking information to the web for LULZ, which means doing something for fun, as it was a joke. Their objectives were politicians, public websites, news agency, et cetera.
When I think about how crackers acts for the sake of humor, I automatically think about the Black Mirror episode 3 of season 3, “Shut Up and Dance.” It shows how people can be manipulated when you have access to their very private information. The episode highlights how powerful could be a very good hacker.

Talking about hackers, we need to mention Anonymous. Gabriella Coleman in her chapter from the book Beyond Wiki narrates their story. They started as different hacker groups that worked for the LULZ, to troll organizations and people, and were nominated “the face of chaos.” They became political in 2008 when they attacked the Church of Scientology leaking information about their abuse of human rights. The organization is a team of hackers, editors, and experts in social network activities that act according to their ethical code. They are perceived as human rights advocacy groups; for example, they exposed more than 1500 child pornographers, pushing police to arrest them. Their ethic is focused on the idea that there are no individuals in the organization: everything they do is thanks to Anonymous, such a Pluribus Unum. They aimed to create an idea of something anonymous that act for the sake of justice. As the author says, Anonymous is an idea, and you cannot arrest an idea.

After the dot.com breakdown, the web changed drastically. According to O’Reilly, the web assumed a new identity from its previous form. Before the 2000s, the web was based on a product-based concept. The networks were products to be sold to the users, where users could only take contents and information as they were. Also, they had to pay for the plugins and the new updates Advertising, in the era of DoubleClick, was based on long and professional contracts between the advertising services and the client companies.

The new internet, Web 2.0, became completely different. After its “digivolution,” the total concept changed: the network became a platform. The web wasn’t a place were users could only pay for a service through which they could take contents passively anymore. The web became a platform on which people could connect making new contents. Users became active, and through the structure of hyperlinks, they were able to empower and enhance the web itself through a net of connections and new user-generated contents. Google with its link structure, made an optimized searching engine that though a series of algorithms would optimize itself constantly influenced by the user’s usage. Advertising also twisted: now web advertisers were simple o use, and any user could advertise their content even though simple banners or popups. That happened because the market focused on the number of potential clients, rather than big single ones, focusing on the long tail of the Web, rather than the head.

Blogging changed the type of relations between people. In Web 1.0, users could read personal webpages without interacting, again, receiving passively the content. With the blogs, however, people could see a chronological link of thoughts, could share the blog posts, could comment on them starting new relationships and conversations.

This user interaction, however, changed drastically the market. The platform now needed daily upgrades and constant bug fixes, while before upgrades were made every two or three years. Now users could immediately tell what they like or what they don’t, and the big platforms know what to change to fulfill the right demand. O’Reilly calls this, “the perpetual beta”: software and platform that are continuously changing, never reaching a fixed end. This type of influence changed also the online market. On online stores such as Amazon, users can leave reviews of what they like and what they don’t, while in the past, if a product didn’t reach the user expectations, either they could not buy it, or they would have bought it taking the product as it was. On the web, with the strong impact of social media and users discussions and opinions, everything is now under their influence. For example, Sonic The Hedgehog, a movie directed by Jeff Fowler , was meant to be released in November 2019. After the first trailer, however, the internet exploded, and thousands of fan criticized very badly the design of the loved blue animal.

After this backlash, the producers decided to delay the release to May 2020 and completely redesign the main character!  

The first pages of “The internet of history” give a general overview of how the internet was born and how it changed over the years. The article begins by explaining that the internet was born to fulfill military needs. Being independent, decentralized, and strong are all features that were meant to protect the net from the US enemies, for example. After its military origins, it has been influenced by cultural ideas and values, becoming a place where communities could thrive, communicate and play with each other. In the 90s were born also the first form of role games and virtual lives where people could imagine and build a better life in a safe and fake environment. One of the biggest concepts that gave positivity to the idea of the internet was the concept that democracy occurs when people have access to information. The article goes on explaining that the internet was seen as positive for almost its first 30 years since it was a public good usable by any user, and it could connect people. In its latest period, however, it became a place where the market took over the net with the creations of online ads, spam, pop-ups, et cetera, beginning the era of digital capitalism.

I think that the internet is a mysterious place that exists without existing. A sort of Peter Pan’s Neverland: we use it, we know it’s there, but when we think about it, we think of it abstractly. We do not think about the giant servers located around the world collecting all of our data. The positive wave is always present. For example, when we think about Alexa, the new Amazon’s AI, we think about a device that can help us innovate our lifestyle with a bit of a hi-tech; we surely don’t think about the fact that Alexa could record us 24/7 and sell all the information it collects to bigger institutions. My main takeaway from this article is that, when we are talking about the internet, we are constantly living in an “I know it’s bad, but in reality, I believe everything is ok” conception. Now, especially in 2019, we all know that social media, websites, and numerous devices take our information and sell them to big organizations, but probably, and I’m talking from my personal POV, we don’t mind. Continuing leaving in our comfortable hi-tech world is too fantastic.