Remediation

“Ceci tuera cela: this book will destroy that building.” This remark was made by a priest in Victor Hugo’s novel Notre-Dame de Paris, 1482. A remark made by a priest meant not only that printing and literacy would undermine the authority of the church but also that “human thought…… would change its mode of expression, that the principal idea of each generation would no longer write itself with the same materials and in the same way, that the book of stone, so solid and durable, would give place to the book made of paper, yet, more solid and durable” (The Writing Space, 1). When we talk about remediation we are talking about taking something and putting it into a completely different medium and that medium will affect the way we select, reflect and deflect the information we obtain and retain. In our rapidly evolving technology, media is being remediated faster than we can keep up with.

It is hard to select one “thing” that we can talk about being remediated. We can start with the obvious, the newspaper. The newspaper is a staple of American history. Growing up watching my parents and grandparents reading the Sunday paper cover-to-cover is a fond memory of my childhood. While I do not recall ever reading a paper in its entirety, I do occasionally enjoy picking up one up from just to hold it in my hand and read without clicking a mouse to navigate my way to the story I wish to read. It may be that I grew up in a print dominated paradigm, prior to computers and Internet, and that may be why I prefer to “hold” that paper in my hand when I have the opportunity. I feel that we loose that sense of closure when we remediate a news article from print to the web. When reading text there is a beginning and ending to the article. On the web we can follow links in order to possibly find out further information on the topic. When we follow links our attention may be directed elsewhere. The author of the original text has thus lost his or her reader and the intended rhetorical situation. When we read a newspaper we have closure on the article. On the other hand, the printed text can no longer keep pace with the Internet. We are able to access breaking news as it happens on-line, where as it may be the following morning before we are able to read about it in print. We see many major newspapers folding, and we are reminded of how stone gave way to paper, that same paper is struggling not to give way to digital text.

Print is not the only aspect of our lives that are being remediated. Remediation of the classroom is rapidly changing. This course is a hybrid, which combines face-to-face and on-line instruction. Other courses are 100% on-line. What does this mean for the future of classroom learning? Research is being proposed in the K-12 school systems in the US to create virtual classrooms. South Carolina has been on the fast-track to implement a “school of the future” in the very near future. With the recent budget cuts, some of the implementation has been drastically scaled back.

I have been working on a focus group in Anderson School District 4 on a School of the Future Project that I hope continues despite the budget cuts. This type of classroom is a 24-7 environment with amazing technology. I wanted to link a prototype, but the site is currently not operational (possibly shut down for the summer). I am pasting a picture of what the proposed classroom would resemble. Each child would develop his or her own avatar and participate real-time with the instructor and other classmates. This type of remediation would definitely engage the students, however; I feel the one-on-one, face-to-face interaction is necessary in education and for functioning in life in general. If we remove the interaction, do we not also remove a social component of ourselves?

Projected virtual classroom in 2012

As digital technology continues to evolve there are so many aspects of our lives that can be remediated. We no longer have to take our film from our camera and have it developed. We can upload our pictures directly from our camera to our Facebook accounts. Taking a pen a paper out to write a letter to a friend has been remediated to making posts to Facebook or Twitter. This remediation forces us to. The way we understand information comes from the source we receive it. We comprehend information differently when we get the information from a different medium.

References
Bolter, Jay David. The Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1991.