Remediation.
In their book Remediation, Bolter and Grusin investigate the ways in which old media and new media engage with one another and the implication of this dual-directional influence. They locate this relationship between the forces of immediacy and hypermediacy. An evaluation of immediacy involves the transparency of a medium, while hypermediacy addresses the awareness of the media object itself. These fundamental qualities structure the refiguring of older mediums within new media and vice versa.
Walter Benjamin suggests that reading began as mystics read star signs in entrails (Der Derian 41), that the systematic relationships communicated in mythology served to index the most basic forms of communications. As one of the oldest systems of metaphors, that is language-like representations or mediums, mythology has undergone numerous remediation processes. As Bolter and Grusin assert, the influence of remediation is both forward and backward reaching. As new media, presumably such things as cave painting and music came to represent the mythology they also changed the form and content of the old stories. At the same time, the mythological figures themselves evolved to address modern questions. There arose modern genres from the ancient myths. Just as Homer mythologized war for the Greeks so Shakespeare’s histories romanticized war for the English. At the same time, these authors understood what they were doing and included moments of irony and self-reflection, exposing the hypermediate frame of the myth object within the immediate message (Hedges 26).
An imbalance of hypermediacy / immediacy threatens to overpower the message with the medium itself. If a viewer forgets that the frame of the television set is an artificial construct, not simply an immediate window to reality, a new perception of reality is created within those bounds. As far as the viewer has utility to act upon her convictions, her decisions will be constrained within the same artificially framed reality she subscribes to. However, an obtuse media object may convey a stronger message of its own than it can communicate. One example of this is the embedded journalists in the most recent Iraq war—the news story came to be the fact that they existed in that place rather than an independent event that they reported.
As news media develops its capacity for immediacy, through radio then television and now 24-hour live coverage, the immediate communication of the horrors of war becomes more viable. As Susan Sontag puts it, “the vast maw of modernity has chewed up reality and spat the whole mess out as images” (109), and this inundation of decontextualized imagery lacks a systematic semiology. Pictures, especially pictures of war, cannot be interpreted in the same way that the same visual impressions are interpreted during a direct experience. It is the interest of very few to present graphic war photography out of any context. This brings our culture full-circle back to the original reason for creating and propagating mythology—a need to explain the inexplicable manifestation of death.
Traditional mythology is an easy way to assign a narrative to the flat horror of war photography. Americans recognize the morals of stories they heard as children, the spirit of mythological storytelling. Whether it is the daring rescue of a damsel in distress, a heroic last-ditch stand, or an epic struggle against Evil (communists, terrorists, infidels), it is easy and practical for news media to couch decontextualized imagery in the familiar language of myth. Sagas require little back story and no justification, they enrapture audiences and absolve their heroes of guilt.