im in ur class, hypermediating ur classroom experience

"The work of art today seems to offer 'an aspect of reality which cannot be freed from mediation or remediation'..."

- Walter Benjamin

Having finished Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation: Understanding New Media, my first reaction is to admit that I never realized just how much of my life is concerned with or centered around media, or at least how much media impacts the decisions I make on a daily basis. I have always been well aware of how much television I watch (too much), how many hours I spend online (too many), what sort of advertising is being shoved down my throat (no, really, please remind me that my laundry come out as dazzlingly, sparklingly clean as you promise it will). Considering how many devices or outlets are in the direct vicinity of me right now – four computers, a cell phone, a television, a variety of gaming consoles, a stack of textbooks, a digital camera – it seems unlikely that I could ever completely forget how much of my daily life is made up of expressions via the various mediums.

In that vein, I decided to trace my (mediated) steps in order to closely examine just what I do when I decide to post something online.

This is my cat Maneki. It might be a little difficult to tell, but in the photo she is sitting on the notes that I took for the first day of class for this course. I had brought them out to review when she decided that this particular spot was where she wanted to sit. To me, her facial expression almost seems to say, “What? Did you need these?” It’s a simple enough explanation for the presence of a photograph on this blog, and yet I had to take multiple steps through several points of media in order to get it to this point:

First, I had the thought that Maneki sitting on my notes might make a great photo, which turned into me grabbing my iPhone 4s and opening up the camera application. After the photo was taken and I decided to upload it here, I scrolled through to the second page of my phone’s menu to the sub-folder marked “Photography”. I opened up the Instagram application, uploaded the photo from the phone’s internal photo album and sized it according to the specifications of the app. Next, I added the “Rise” filter in order to enhance the light quality of the photo (which was taken at night in the low-lighting from my desk’s lamp). The filtered-photo instantly uploads itself to my Instagram account, and also saves a copy to my phone. Next, I connected my phone to my IMB Thinkpad x60 and copied the photo to my CSUN-logoed flash drive. I opened Firefox Mozilla (which automatically loads the Google homepage), hit the bookmarked button for Blogger, logged in, and created a new post. I uploaded the photo, placed it alongside the text for this post that I had already typed up and edited through Microsoft Word, and saved the posting. Throughout this whole procedure, I had Pandora (internet radio) playing (although I pony up the $3.99 a month to have my account be ad-free).

This extensive process immediately resonates with Bolter and Grusin’s argument that the “twin preoccupations of contemporary media [are] the transparent presentation of the real and the enjoyment of the opacity of media themselves” (21). The photo is a presentation of the real because this event actually occurred on September 1^st 2012 at 12:24 AM in the living room of my apartment in West Hollywood, California. I did not stage the photo (that is to say, I didn’t place my cat there – like most cats, it is simply in her nature to get in my way whenever it’s most inconvenient for me, which often results in her sitting on things that I need to use). Thus, the photograph is a piece of evidence of something that occurred serendipitously and without forethought, of something that I would argue to be “real”. On the other hand, the photo takes on the properties of a hypermediated object due to the effort I have taken in enhancing the photo, transitioning it from one device to another, adding it to my blog, etc. – all in the name of sharing it with the online community. In response to Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that “unlike a filmgoer, the viewer of a painting is absorbed into the work, as if the medium had disappeared”, I would argue that it is the process that makes photographs (themselves remediated from paintings) hypermediated, that brings forth the acknowledgment that the medium cannot be ignored or separated from the object itself (Bolter and Grusin 75). I doubt anybody familiar with photography, filtering or software programs like Photoshop would be easily fooled into believing this photograph to be a perfect representation of the “real”. Despite the idea that the “photograph was often regarded as going too far in the direction of concealing the artist by eliminating him altogether”, it seems that with the rise in software, applications and programs that promise to turn even the most amateur photographer into an artiste, digitalized photographs are now a direct product of the photographer themselves (Bolter and Grusin 25). Furthermore, I would argue that the photograph’s placement on a blog (versus, for example, an actual printed image on photo paper) creates a hypermediated experience. The viewer is constantly aware of the interchange between the text and image, as well as the side columns denoting my past entries and my profile, the considerations I have made in designing the look of the blog (my rudimentary knowledge of HTML pays off sometimes), as well as the simple presence of a cursor, scrolling sidebar and windowed browser. When William J. Mitchell describes the “windowed styled” of the Internet as “‘[emphasizing] process or performance rather than the finished art object’”, we could also take it to be applied to any aspect of digital media – including a simple photograph of an annoying feline (Bolter and Grusin 31). After all, the photograph only constitutes a small part of the whole practice of reading this blog. 

During the whole process, I was constantly aware that I was fashioning a particular piece of media (in this case, a photo) into something that would transcend simple mimesis. I don’t think I’ve ever put this much thought into such a relatively simple act, and yet it does make me reflect on how each individual choice I make involving contemporary media is itself a significant performance of a hypermediated existence. By altering the original photo, adding a colorized filter, moving it across multiple devices, uploading it to various platforms, and finally, allowing it to be viewed publicly on a blog, I have shifted it out of the realm of simple reflection of the real world and into the realm of the digital, of the shareable and of the hypermediated.

Bonus hypermediazation: I made my cat a lolcat.


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Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000. Print.