Consider your experience of hypermediacy when surfing the Internet or using social media. Does it recall your experiences with other media, or is this unique?

Elsewhere, Bolter (2000) further discusses immediacy and hypermediacy. He notes that enthusiasts often assume that digital media must break radically with the aesthetic and cultural traditions of their predecessors. However, new media and new genres are best understood by examining the ways in which they refashion or “remediate” older forms. Remediation operates according to two representational strategies. The first, which is “transparent immediacy,” attempts to erase or conceal the process of remediation by making the medium itself invisible; that is, we see the image as though directly and are largely unaware of the artifice or machine that produces it. Linear-perspective painting since the Renaissance, most photography, and the Hollywood film style, all pursue transparent immediacy.

The second strategy, which is “hypermediacy,” calls attention to the process of remediation by acknowledging or highlighting the medium itself. Much of television, rock music stage productions, and the World Wide Web are hypermediated. Immediacy is a unified visual space, while hypermediacy is windows that open to other representations or other media. Hypermediacy “privileges fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity and emphasizes process on performance rather than finished art object” (Bolter 2000, 31.)

Although one can think of the Internet as a good example of this, it did not start with it. Bolter and Grusin use the example of magazines such as Wired to illustrate that this is not new. A magazine layout features many combinations of media such as text and images, all together but not one overbearing on the other. Much like windows on a desktop, they do not all try and blend into each other. They contrast with each other, and give you different perspectives. Finally, they comment that the Internet is culture’s “most influential expression of hypermediacy.”

Q. Consider your experience of hypermediacy when surfing the Internet or using social media. Does it recall your experiences with other media, or is this unique?