Tag Archives: Media

Re/membering, Receipts, and Resistance: Black Girl Magic for a Time Such as This

Posted on by

There is a longstanding joke among men in the Black community that Black women do not forget anything…ever. Black women have more recently co-signed and reified this truth by publicly producing figurative and literal “receipts” documenting the past when necessary.

Black women have been about this memory and truth life. While the world benefits, these good deeds often go unrecognized. There’s so much more I could say about Black women and public displays of rhetorical memory, but for now I want to frame the significance of it in these times.

In The Writer’s Book of Memory: An Interdisciplinary Study for Writing Teachers, Janine Rider highlighted the importance of memory as a canon of rhetoric in Composition Studies, pedagogy, and overall human function. She rebuffed inadequate understandings of memory as rote memorization of information, and explored memory as not only the storehouse of information, but also as cognitive and interpretive processes that require language and make human life meaningful. It is because of the epistemological functions of memory, that Rider argued an emphasis on memory becomes all the more vital as we develop and use more forms of external memory and media. Rider’s claims during the 1990s, a time of floppy disks and network television news broadcasts, seem prophetic now during this time of 24-hour cable news streams, incessant and ever changing social media feeds, and claims of “fake news.”

Rider’s final chapter “Re/membering Culture(s),” provided a precedent for understanding collective memory-making through media. Citing David Marc, she discussed/ the ways in which television in all of its pervasiveness serves as a form of public memory representing, recording, and re-circulating our cultural norms. Marc and Rider also highlighted the influence that advertisers have over what airs and how our collective memory is shaped. The parallels between the role of television then, and the current role of social media feeds as makers of collective memory and tools of influence for company owners, advertisers, users and other stakeholders are striking. Television and social media are both so pervasive and embedded in our culture that their influence is often not visible. This invisibility is aided by the immediacy (Bolter and Grusin 1999) of the media itself. Immediacy is defined as a “style of visual representation whose goal is to make the viewer forget the presence of the medium (canvas, photographic film, cinema, and so on) and believe that he is in the presence of the objects of representation” (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 272). Within this context, it then becomes easy to accept an externally crafted collective memory or truth as one’s own, if they do not have their own sense of memory, truth and literacies to decipher and articulate them.

“What happened to ‘All Lives Matter’?”, a sign at a protest against Donald Trump

Rider described how the disconnect between external information and our lived experiences and memories can lead to silence in ways that resonate deeply with me during this current moment of post-truth and gaslighting regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and systemic racial injustice and state violence:

In a world where we are bombarded with information, where we must depend on external memory banks for knowledge way too profuse for us ever to absorb completely, we are silenced. When our own sense of connection or knowledge or reality seems at odds with flow of events outside us and the prevailing ‘wisdom,’ we are silenced. We have nothing to say. We have no language with which to make ourselves understood. Our memories do not connect with our high-tech, mass-produced, and mass-promoted culture, we cannot understand ourselves or our world. (Rider 116)

Fortunately, this is not the case for many Black women who utilize social media. Black women’s rhetorical memory, including (re)membering (Dillard 2008, 2016) and rememory (Morrison), in this post-truth era continues to resist silence and erasure. Black women’s rhetorical memory includes the use of Black women’s language, Black girls’ digital literacies such as hashtags, and endarkened feminist praxis (Dillard 2016). Rider’s assertions about the need for our own language and memory in order to resist, write, live, and make meaning as autonomous subjects has never been more salient. Black women and girls are not new to this, but have always been true to this, and continue to show how it should be done.

An image captured during The Women’s March, a worldwide protest that took place after Donal Trump’s presidential innauguration, on January 21, 2017

Bolter and Grusin – Remediation: Understanding New Media

Posted on by

Bolter, J. D., and R. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. The MIT Press, 2000. Print.

As the title states, this text seeks to help readers understand “new media” by highlighting what is and isn’t new about it by using the theory of remediation. Bolter and Grusin placed new digital media, specifically visual media, within the contexts of older media such as photography, painting, television, etc. to demonstrate how by definition each medium is understood in relation to another.

“Digital visual media can best be understood through the ways in which they honor, rival, and revise  linear-perspective painting, photography, film, television, and print. No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces. What is new about  new media comes from the particular ways in which they  refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves  to answer the  challenges of new media.” (15)

Their central argument was that more aggressive practices of remediation, the representation of one medium in another, is a defining characteristic of the new digital media (45): “Unlike  our other examples  of  hypermediacy,  this  form of  aggressive remediation does create an apparently seamless space.  It  conceals its  relationship  to earlier media in the  name of  transparency;  it promises the user an unmediated experience, whose paradigm again is virtual reality” (56).

The text is divided into three major sections: theory, illustrations, and implications for remediation and new media on American culture’s definition of self. The authors argued that new media, and technologies in general, must be understood in terms of their connection to other media, culture, and our social identities.

“The  World Wide Web is  not  merely  a  software  protocol and text and  data  files. It  is  also  the sum  of  the  uses  to which this  protocol is  now being  put:  for  marketing and advertising,  scholarship,  personal expression,  and  so on. These uses  are as much a part  of  the  technology as the  software  itself  For  this  reason, we  can say  that  media technologies  are agents in our culture without  falling  into  the trap  of technological  determinism.  New digital  media are not external agents that  come to disrupt an unsuspecting  culture. They  emerge from within  cultural contexts,  and  they  refashion  other media,  which are embedded  in the same  or similar contexts.” (19)

Their discussion of remediation opens up space for more nuanced discussions of human and technological agency in new media:

“Computer programs may  ultimately be human products,  in the  sense that  they  embody algorithms devised by human programmers,  but once the  program is  written and loaded,  the  machine can  operate without  human  intervention” (27).

Remediation as a theoretical framework is helpful in understanding this phenomenon because we can see how, in attempts to achieve transparency and immediacy, programmers intentionally seek  to remove the traces  of  their presence  in order to give  these programs the greatest possible autonomy (27).

The authors defined two major concepts in remediation, immediacy and hypermediacy, and explained how the two are simultaneously in tension with one another and interdependent. In short, the two can be understood through the “window/s” metaphor:

“Where immediacy  suggests a  unified visual space, contemporary hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived of  not  as a  window on to the world, but rather  as ‘windowed’ itself-with windows that open on to other representations or other media” (34).

Examples of hypermediacy in modern art include collages and photo-montages.

Hypermedia  and  transparent media are  opposite manifestations  of the  same desire:  “the desire  to get past  the limits of representation  and  to achieve the real.” Not “real” in a metaphysical sense, but “real” based on the viewers experience; “it is that which would evoke an immediate (and therefore authentic) emotional response” (53). This appeal to authenticity of experience is what brings the logics of immediacy and hypermediacy together (71).

The authors argued that this desire for immediacy is neither new nor neutral. One of the most compelling examples of this desire is the image of a draftsman drawing a picture of a nude woman from Albrect Durer, Unterweysung der Messung, Nurenberg, 1538. Bolter and Grusin suggested the image shows the desire for immediacy in viewing the female body with a clinical gaze “to analyze and control, if not possess, its female object” (79). They argued, “The  woodcut  suggests  the  possibility  that  technologies  of transparent  immediacy based on linear perspective, such  as  perspective  painting, photography, and film, or  computer graphics and virtual  reality, may  all be enacting the  so-called  male gaze, excluding  women  from  full  participation  as subjects  and maintaining  them  as objects” (79). At the same time, this example shows how media can be used to deny female desire and subjectivity, the book also offers numerous examples of human bodies are mediated as well as how immediacy and hypermediacy are employed to express new identities and subjectivities in new media.

Ultimately, Bolter and Grusin contended that because all media are understood in relation to other media, the only thing brand new about new media are the unique ways that we employ them in particular contexts now, and this will continue to be the case with any other new media: “The true novelty would be a new medium that did not refer for its meaning to other meaning at all. For our culture, such mediation without remediation seems to be impossible” (271).