Writing Under the Pressure of Technology

One Response to “Anthony Westover On “Remediation: Understanding New Media””

1. allison schuette-hoffman Says:
   October 14th, 2009 at 5:14 pm

   Anthony,

   First of all, I want to thank you for bringing so much of your outside experience with technology to bear on this class and this podcast. It’s not only great that you brought in Christopher Kale for this particular assignment, but also great that you are always speaking for the cyber community. Not many of us in the class have that angle on experience.

   Second, I found this statement of yours really provocative: that VR is limited by the fact that it must embrace what’s natural, that without some touchstone to reality, there’s only the virtual and no one, presumably, can imagine this because our imaginations are themselves shaped by our experience of what’s “real.” (I’m going beyond your own statement in the podcast a little here as I draw out the underlying assumption of your claim.) I wonder if this claim doesn’t in turn come back to challenge the other claim you want to insist upon–that digital media is radically new media. If it simply helps us access our imagined worlds more easily, efficiently, thoroughly (?), is it not a difference of “quantity” rather than “quality”?

   I’d also leave you with this: I don’t think the author’s of Remediation would fundamentally disagree with any of your claims. They focus less on the product of new media. Instead, they want to talk about the DESIRE we have for media, why we turn to it at all in the first place. This logic, of immediacy, is what they say hasn’t changed and isn’t new.

   Good job. Check plus.

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