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50 Consuming Media

or universal, but still have a presence and efficacy in the media world of a given
society. The metaphor of a circuit may simultaneously suggest the spiral-formed
processes of consumption and communication through which these media are used.
The manner in which production, distribution, sales and consumption of media is
organized results in a reasonably widespread consensus on what constitutes a media
circuit in a given context, though there will always be border cases and contested
fields.
In the process of media development, each new medium initially mimics the old,
existing ones, in trying to improve them, thus promising brand-new tools for
communication, while simultaneously being woven into the gradually evolving soci-
etal media networks, in a process of ‘remediation’ – a term coined by Jay D. Bolter
9
and Richard Grusin. They conceive of the historical development of new media as
a process of remediation where limitations of previous ones are remedied by new
forms that simultaneously always also copy and quote key traits of the old ones –
both in form and content. This process is propelled by a dialectical interplay between
‘immediacy’ and ‘hypermediacy’. On the one hand, there is a wish for transparent
mediation that would enable media users to forget completely all the mediating appa-
ratus and interact as if nothing stood between them and the media content. On the
other hand, we find a reflexive attention to the peculiarities of mediating technology
as such, making it an opaque object in the focus of activity. This dialectic works on
several levels, including a transfer and adaptation of content to new media as well as
the formal traits of how these new media are constructed and used. With Diane
Gromala, Bolter has later developed other terms to discuss this oscillation between
transparency and reflectiveness, arguing that ‘every interface is a mirror as well as a
window’, and suggesting ‘frames’ as a third term between the two. 10 Each medium
should then be seen as a constructed frame that can oscillate between being regarded
as a transparent window (between people, or between users and texts) and a reflecting
mirror (drawing attention to the media technology and design itself).
The digital age has intensified the remediation process, where new media
constantly reproduce and replace other media, making intermediality and intertex-
tuality key features of the media world. It should however be remembered that reme-
diation is no new phenomenon. Film, for instance, has been used since its invention
to remediate literature, and the content of each new medium tends to be related to
older media. Bolter and Grusin refer to Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan’s
remark in Understanding Media that ‘the “content” of any medium is always another
medium’, which implies that remediation is inherent in all media and is not specific
to our epoch. 11 With the accelerating addition of an expanding number of media
technologies into the growing network of media forms, it becomes more and more
complex. The contemporary adaptation of older analogue media to digital format is
a remediation process whereby computer networks mediate records, films, videos,
newspapers or photos. Digital remediation also disconnects established relationships
between media, form and content. As computers, fibre wires, mobile phones and
DVD disks serve as media – in the sense of vehicles – for many kinds of form and