Modern Media vs Older Media

Remediation is a book that precisely focuses on media's affect on the individual and in the first chapter Bolter and Grusin mainly focus on the media in technology such as computers and television mean while  also discussing it in photographs and in written form. One word that provides a great example of the media's effects is photorealism. It compares a photograph to a graphic design and the authors show how both ultimately have a cause the same effect, but through a different means. Is this the same for all media? We can't say they all have the same cause, but they do in deed have the same purpose. Bolter and Grusin compare and contrast the modern digital technologies such as the internet, virtual actuality, and computer graphics to earlier media which is a new set of aesthetic, artistic, and cultural values. In the dictionary remediation is a correction of something bad or flawed.  Does this mean our modern media is defective? It simply means new medias try and do better than past medias. Society in modern times wants to "both multiply its media and erase all traces of mediation."(25) It's almost as if one media is growing out of another. Examples of the media can be immediacy and hypermediacy. Although immediacy is seen as the direct content of the mind as distinguished from representation and hypermediacy is a more subtle and free concept, immediacy leads to hypermediacy. Bolter and Grusin price how there is much more to media than just being older or newer and how it affects us in many more ways than we can possibly imagine. Immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation may all have one word in common yet they are three different concepts that shape who we are as individuals and who we are as a society. 

Bolter, J. David, and Richard A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000. Print.