Mental wanderings about "The Remediated Self"

Bolter and Grusin's chapter on the remediated self carried me back a few weeks to our in-class discussion of Facebook and the possibility of a disembodied existence online. The authors liken the remediated self to William James’ empirical self, “the sum total of all that [a man] CAN call his” (qtd. 233). In this way, the disembodied self on a social networking site is not a disembodied self at all, nor is it its own entity. Rather, this projection belongs to a corpus of facets and objects that together comprise the self. The authors note that while James acknowledges the existences of a material self, a social self, and a spiritual self, none is more representative of the actual self than another. I am Jasmine, the clothes in my closet, the car I come to school in, the roof I sleep under, the knowledge I accumulate, the friends I have in “real life” and online, the body that carries me around and facilitates the vocalization of my thoughts, the computer I use and the IP address from which I post this blog. (Why do I keep coming back to this free-floating signifier thing?!) As we continue to mediate, we accumulate new aspects of ourselves. While it may seem that we have some control over the self that we choose to present or promote online, we do not; this image, this identity, simply tacks itself on to the people we already are (not in essentialist terms, but rather in the present, existentialist sense). My Facebook profile does not define me or redefine me or stake out a cyberspace claim for me to occupy; rather, it is now [part of] me, not a projection but a component, no more or less essential to my self than any other singular element of my existence, not representative but constitutive.

Video games: Advertisements for hegemony

Bolter and Grusin observe in their chapter on computer games that “ideologically, the player [of a video game] is asked to defend or reestablish the status quo, so that even though the violence of the games appears to be antisocial, the ultimate message is not.” In this way, “action games have played out the most aggressive form of televisual monitoring” (93). This idea intrigued me, particularly because of the greatly heated debates I’ve witnessed in my own lifetime about the danger of video games, both in public and personal spheres. While immediacy and transparency of the game play is made possible by the technology, the same opportunities are afforded to hegemonic ideals through the same mechanisms. That is, the plot and world of a game encompass a player who is marveled by the first person perspective and increasingly realistic graphics, and these game features simultaneously imbue in him/her a specific political/moral/cultural agenda. As we’ve noted before this quarter, new technologies are not wholly new. They share much with older technologies, and this notion of articulating and reselling dominant ideology through media is not new to video games. However, the interactivity of video games and the repetition of game play, I think, may make them more pervasive.

Remediating (our motivations in) the classroom

To think about remediation in the classroom, or rather, to think about remediating the classroom, requires an instructor to rediscover his or her fundamental motivations and pedagogical beliefs. In my ponderings, I noted that Bolter and Grusin’s theory of remediation maintains that media constantly changes, shifts, and blends. That writing, academic or otherwise, stays static makes little sense. Because we ought not to treat the classroom like a vacuum, we must be aware of the changing rhetorical situations in the world beyond the classroom door and incorporate the skills necessary to be successful in these rhetorical moments into our teachings. It would be a great disservice to our students to ignore the movements in the world “out there” and pretend that they (and we) belong to a stagnant world “in here.” When I mentioned this in class, someone posed this question: “Yes, we can say we want to bring technologies into our classrooms to empower students, but what’s in it for us?”

The question blindsided me. Of course, I take graduate courses because I enjoy them and because I love learning, but I plan to teach first and foremost because I love the possibility of empowering others. What is in it for me is what is good for my students. Granted, like all desires, my plan to teach also benefits me directly; it is not wholly selfless. I might get summers off to travel. Empowering others will, hopefully, contribute to positive, larger scale social change that will benefit everyone, including myself. Teaching will allow me to continue learning, will afford me the chance to meet many different people from whom I can acquire new skills and new knowledge, and will give me the opportunity to take part in engaging, critical discussions of theory, its manifestations, and its applications. To ignore technology, new media, and the changing nature of mediation (past, present and future), then, would be to deprive students of the opportunity to communicate more effectively with the people around them and would deprive all of us (students and teachers) the opportunity to gain new insight about today’s “what is,” and to think critically and rhetorically, as Selber might suggest, about why it is, how we fit into it all, and how we can shape it and ourselves when change becomes necessary.

To think about remediating the classroom, we must not just question our feelings towards technology; we must also question what motivates us to teach and what we consider our goal in the classroom.

A whole lot of -mediacies and -mediations!

Remediation is the appropriation of one medium, or of content or characteristics of one medium, by another medium. Remediation echoes the myth of the inherent link between technology and progress, and furthers this notion by suggesting a connotation of healing or curing. Bolter and Grusin trace the word “remediation” back to its Latin root, remederi in order to solidify this link (59). We live in a forever imperfect world, according to our consumerist behaviors, but these consumer imperfections are different than those that we might point to consciously. Through our purchasing patterns, we insist that the technologies we currently use do not have the capabilities we need or want, do not best reflect ourselves, or do not allow us to create/work/organize/etc. to our fullest capabilities. As Bolter and Grusin suggest, however, we don’t “realize that the older medium [has] failed in its promise until the new one appears” (60).

As I understand it, hypermediation refers to the bombardment of media that makes media seem more real, which is the goal of all media according to the authors. This pursuit of realistic representation, of real technological experience and of experiencing reality through technological means, translates into, when done successfully, transparency of the employed medium. Transparent immediacy likewise strives for realism, working to pin down a mediated experience as the experience or a mediated object as the object, to define it, its existence, through a singular, transparent technological gaze. Hypermediacy, on the other hand, represents the technological glance, or multiple gazes from various points of view. Hypermediacy provides are more multifaceted interpretation of an experience or an object than does immediacy, and in that way is more real and at the same time, more obviously mediated.

School district lends laptops, violates rights.

Not nervous enough about technology? Read this.

Functional literacy.

Thomas can work his Blackberry. I can take sneaky pictures. Bwahaha!

Really, world?

http://www.cbs2.com/video/?id=127675@kcbs.dayport.com