Remediation – The Keyword for the Mobile Age
Way back in 1973, science fiction author Larry Niven wrote a short story called "Flash Crowd", which examined the social consequences of a society with instant transportation and instant communication.
The people of this future already have the mobile media access that we have today; the catch is that they also have teleporter booths where they can zap themselves to any point on Earth. The result is that any news-worthy event reported on the media generates an instant crowd of thousands of people who teleport in from all over the world to check out the story for themselves. As science fiction authors go, Niven has a pretty good batting-average for predicting the future. This puts him in the same ranks as Neil Stephenson and William Gibson.
Today, lacking the teleporter technology, we still have and use the term "flash mob". This is a group of people throughout a large urban area who coordinate their actions over mobile communication channels to arrive in the same place. This can have a serious purpose, such as organizing a protest, rally, or strike, or it can have a more playful reason, such as Worldwide Pillow Fight Day and other culture-jamming pranks from groups like Improv Everywhere.
Another kind of flash mob is a virtual one happening on the Internet. When a top 100 website or blog links to your obscure little website, thousands of visitors will show up in minutes, which puts unusual strain on your server. This is called being "Slashdotted".
And now to our focus: flash mobs are made possible because of remediation. "Remediation", a term first coined by new media scholars Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, means that all media that is produced today can be recycled into new formats, distributed by a peer network, and can basically ride the wind around the world.
Remediation in action: Paint a picture, and it hangs in a museum. Snap a digital image of that picture and post it on the Internet, and it will show up on 35 blogs this week, be referenced in Wikipedia, be Photoshopped into five image mashups and posted on 4chan, twittered to a network of mobile users, be aggregated into content feeds in 20 languages, and saved as desktop wallpaper by 12 websurfers. Say something on the Internet, and if it gets cross-posted and shared enough, it will never die.
Big, commercial media of the past - newspapers, television, and radio - have nothing like this power. There will never again be a time when all media content is in the hands of a few companies. Instead, the first-person journalism of the blog world is rapidly trumping traditional media. Think back to the most recent big story you heard about. Chances are, you saw it on the web first. Typically, a story will break on Digg or Reddit, get blogged within hours all over the globe, and show up on news websites by that evening. The TV news will get wind of it by tomorrow, and newspapers might not catch the story at all. By the time it gets to this month's issue of Newsweek, it's a cold cup of coffee.
Remediation is a matter of media ecology. The old hierarchy model of one large content provider to every audience of ten thousand has been replaced by a peer-to-peer model of an almost one-to-one ratio of providers to consumers. Effectively, it is as if we fired the TV station crew and left the studio camera and microphone running for anybody who walks in off the street. More surprisingly, it's turning out that those people off the street do just as good a job!
So, on whatever device you're reading this on, that's your word for the day! Now pat yourself on the back for being a member of the worldwide media team, and pass the link on to the next person.
Filed Under: Mobile Computing
