Location,Location,Location

Abstract

The concept of remediation can help explain the cultural economy of the World Wide Web. As developed in a recently published book (co-authored with Jay Bolter), remediation refers to the way in which new digital media refashion prior media forms. Digital media like computer graphics, virtual reality, and the web define themselves by borrowing from, paying homage to, critiquing, and refashioning their predecessors, principally television, film, photography, and painting, but also print. Furthermore, older media can remediate newer ones within the same media economy. Remediation seems to be a fundamental characteristic not only for contemporary media, but for all visual media at least since the Renaissance with its invention of linear-perspective painting. Each medium seems to follow this pattern of borrowing and refashioning other media, and rivalry as well as homage seems always to be at work. In this paper I take up the cultural economy of the web in relation to three competing conceptual frameworks for making sense of new digital media: cyberspace, ubiquitous computing, and mediated public space. In so doing I hope to move towards an analysis of the cultural economy of the heterogenous networks within which digital media circulate and areconsumed.