Someone give me a paper bag. I'm hypermediating.

I am sitting at my dining room table, my hands in position over my laptop’s keyboard. It is 5:00pm on Friday afternoon, and the following things surround me: make up; a mirror; some trail mix; keys; my checkbook; a calculator; my cell phone; pens; Remediation; my planner; my coffee; and a lighter. These things comprise my immediate environment, but, interestingly, none of them holds my attention. Instead, my eyes are fixed on my computer screen, now staring at these words as I type them, but shifting back and forth to the flashing boxes on the taskbar letting me know that I’ve received a new Google Talk or Skype message. The Google Talk messages appear as blurbs above my taskbar clock, saving me the effort of clicking over to that window to read them until I need to respond. I’ve got another window open, minimized comfortably for now in my taskbar: Mozilla Firefox, my Russian Doll window. Thanks to tab browsing capabilities, I’m currently monitoring Gmail, Facebook, and Blogspot via Firefox. When these bore me, I’ll CTRL + T and open up Twitter, “window” shop at my favorite online retailers, check my bank statement, read the news, find recipes.

Bolter and Grusin, the authors of Remediation, insist that “hypermediation makes us aware of the medium or the media and (in sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious ways) reminds us of our desire for immediacy” (34). While I am very aware of the digital-ness of my online and computer activity, the “real-life” overlap in theme and content (and often, company) makes the transition between real life and digital life nearly seamless. I answer my cell phone, sip my coffee, eat my trail mix, type responses to friends, read about what’s going on in the world, check the weather before deciding what to wear to the movie I’m headed to (the time of which I can easily find out online), copy quotes from print text to Word document, and buy new clothes via the web, which will be shipped to me and which you will likely see me wear at some point in class this quarter. In the age of hypermedia, anything and everything is immediate, available at command. Hypermediacy, I think, sounds like a medical affliction for a reason; it’s only a matter of time before I explode from all this input.