Erasing the (Social) Medium

            By the time I finished reading the introduction to Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation, I admittedly found myself struggling with the “so what” aspect of the text.  The authors tell us that, “Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them” (5), before launching into a discussion about immediacy, hypermediacy, and the ways in which these factors characterize remediation.  For the purposes of this text, remediation essentially comes to characterize the process through which new media technologies improve upon or remedy prior technologies.  And so, being the education-minded future teacher that I am, I began to think about new media and the air of dread that it seems to carry in some classrooms, where instructors are either unwilling, or unprepared to utilize new media effectively in order to help their students write.  Still, I struggled with the concepts of immediacy/hypermediacy and why, or even if they should matter in the classroom. 

            It wasn’t until I got to the chapter on videogames that I began to realize the high stakes that these mediums and/or their effacement carry.  In this chapter Bolter and Grusin write, “[L]ike television, these [video] games are about monitoring the world.  Television and video cameras monitor continuously the visual scene at which they are pointed” (93).  While this “monitoring” refers mostly to computer and videogames, its implications seem far more significant during the period after the book was published (1999), during what was essentially the wake of social networking on the internet.  Once I began thinking of monitoring and mediums in this capacity, I immediately thought of Facebook, and then I remembered this telling little segment from the animated series Futurama.

          Perhaps advertisements aren’t so subliminally advanced that we see them in our dreams, yet, but the immediacy of a technology like Facebook makes us highly susceptible.  And then I realized why immediacy and the medium, or in this case, the effacement of the medium, are so important.  When I thought about Facebook in terms of “monitoring” I was reminded that this site for social networking is essentially the most brilliant market research platform ever created—it’s voluntary, it’s free, and most amazing of all, it’s essentially invisible.  What Facebook represents is a network in which information is constantly imported (likes, check ins, status updates, etc.), processed, and then exported in the form of advertisements catered specifically to the wants/needs/likes/desires of its very consumers, all under the guise of social networking. 

            Is this manipulation?  It is voluntary, after all.  And then I realized the significance of immediacy and remediation, because perhaps the most ingenious element of Facebook is that although it does not expressly efface/hide its tremendous capacity as a market research tool, it is so well integrated into the experience of the site itself that even if any of its users do figure it out (which is not difficult to do), hardly anyone will care enough for it to impact their habit/s of sending and receiving information.  When we think about information being disseminated in this matter, a myriad of other issues arise, from its potential uses to its ethical implications and beyond.  And aside from that I can’t help but wonder, in a medium/space/world of so much information, does knowledge exist?