Remediating Print Poetry: Research #3

I chose to use Jay David Bolter and Richard Grussin’s, Remediation, as one of my New Media theorists for my Senior Project paper. The primary chapter I focused on was “Chapter 2: Mediation and Remediation” since it discusses using a medium to remediate other (generally older) media. A basic definition of remediation is using one medium for “reforming or improving on another” (Bolter 59). My project involves using digital images (film or photos for the most part) to enhance and augment print elegy. Since print writing is considered a medium, I feel this is a remediation of print poetry by digital imagery.

By combining print elegy with images I am able to create “imagetexts” which provide a more rich message than the picture or the words by themselves would (O'Gorman 31). Also, I am able to apply “hypericons” to provide a similar function, the difference being that hypericons have a multiplicity in their messages that imagetexts do not (O'Gorman 19). This would allow a more broad ability for interpreting a piece in various ways. Bolter describes the situation of remediation as, “arguing that at this extended historical moment, all current media function as remediators and that remediation offers us a means of interpreting the work of earlier media as well” (55). The interpretation of print poetry within the framework of digital pictures and film gives print poetry a pictorial element that is becoming prevalent due to the pictorial nature of the internet and television. Since the trend appears to be heading toward having more pictures than words, print poetry needs to assimilate on some level. Also, the reflective quality poetry has on the culture and society producing it fits the idea that digitizing and remediating poetry is a natural step in its evolution. Our society is becoming more digital and more pictorial everyday, so our poetry should reflect this.

Bolter writes, “television, film, and now computer graphics threaten to remediate verbal text both in print and on the computer screen—indeed, to remediate text so aggressively that it may lose much of its historical significance” (57). I feel there are two ways to interpret print losing its “historical significance” (Bolter 57). One: print technology will become null if pictorial, digital technology continues to become more popular since the use of print will die out. Or, two: print will no longer require a socio-historic background knowledge since hyperlinks, pictures, and film will displace the necessity for research into the atmosphere of the time a print work was produced. Obviously, both possibilities could come about, but my personal lean is toward the second option. My efforts in digitizing elegy are centered around the idea that images will explain aspects of the poem that my words do not. A person can watch the digital elegy and understand the atmosphere surrounding the poem. He will see images of the person being memorialized, so when I describe the color of my grandmother’s hair in words an image will be associated with those words which shows her hair. If I describe a road in a rural Georgia town using vague, descriptive terms I can place the text on top of a picture of that road so the audience will more fully understand without having to look up background information explaining what I was talking about. In this way print is remediated without disappearing from the annals of history. I truly hope the first option does not come about, as I personally love print and would be saddened if it were forgotten.

The defining argument for remediation is this: “Each new medium is justified because it fills a lack or repairs a fault in its predecessor, because it fulfills the unkept promise of an older medium” (Bolter 60). This is similar to updates to your operating system. You are not really aware that something isn’t working up to par, but when you receive the newest fix you are made aware of the lack the previous version had and generally do not want to revert back to it. Media simply do the same thing on a deeper level. This is not a system problem with a computer, but a communication problem with society and since human beings communicate through various media, sometimes it becomes necessary to “fix” the old forms of communication or to re-invent them with the new societal norms in mind.

Works Cited:

Bolter, Jay David, Richard Grussin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999.

O'Gorman, Marcel. E-Crit: Digital Media Critical Theory and the Humanities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 2006.