Each new technology begins as a support for the existing state and ends up completely reshaping it. Technology is the strongest factor of change in a system and can also lead to its breakdown with consequences that go far beyond the purely technical ones.
It has also happened with the historical media: the press, cinema, television, radio. Not only has this happened with the advent of the Internet. New media were born, unthinkable just 20 years earlier. Here are applications, social media, self-publishing, next-generation video games, self-broadcasting.
In all media today, content is produced less and less by a creative elite, and more and more by spontaneous generation. They are the new authors, the prosumers of the media, at the same time consumers of content (demanding, critical and often insolent), but also producers (often neglected, approximate and self-indulgent). There are also very good ones that don't regret the generation of author's content.
But there are also the fraudulent ones who have seen in the new media, which by their nature have very elastic meshes, a vehicle for getting rich with the equation page views/advertising and bait content.
The dialectical outcomes of content remediation
In the last twenty years something has happened that scholars of mass society had already theorized, namely the remedying of the medium. A process in which a specific medium historically separated from the others (such as language, technique, diffusion) enters another medium and transforms it intimately, as happens in certain films by David Cronenberg. It is something more than the famous mash-ups of visionary experimenters like William Burroughs, or of great eclectic and even opportunist artists like Picasso.
However, it happens that sometimes the invading body changes the paradigms of the environment that welcomes it and does not always evolve it. Sometimes it involves it, but this can be said in a whisper, otherwise it seems retrograde. Because technology, be it as it may be, is a foundation for growth.
It can certainly be said that the world of information has been subsumed by Facebook and Twitter without becoming much better than when there were those of the fourth estate, quite the contrary. And this fallacy has been agreed upon by not only the meager patrol of technoskeptics and insiders, but also Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, the two heads of the most powerful information media on earth.
But what can they do, poor things!, to stop the involution. They can't do like the Chinese government or the monocratic governments of Islam. They have the truth, we don't have it. Kurosawa had already explained it well in 1950 with Rashamon .
However, Zuckerberg and Dorsey could do as did Eve Williams, one of the founders of Twitter, who, disgusted by microblogging, left Twitter to found Medium, a very beautiful and very serious thing that perfectly combines the old way of get acquainted with the new. But you don't make a lot of money there and you work in the long run. It is therefore a weak model.
Revolution in media consumption
An even more enormous change has occurred on the side of media consumption. Once upon a time, individual media (cinema, TV, books, etc.) offered themselves to the public separately. Markets were compartmentalized. The public made a choice of free time that was exclusive, it envisaged methods of consumption that also required a certain prior organization of one's agenda. It was a choice that a minimum of free will still presupposed.
Today there is, in fact, only one mode of consumption: that of a window into which all the media look in the same way. They compete in it and jostle as one does to grab Angelina Jolie's bouquet. This mode is a screen connected to the Internet, even the viewer of the refrigerator, which offers all possible media, side by side, without distinction of type.
In the following excerpt, taken from a forthcoming book The false mirror. The crisis of reality from Videodrome to Westworld (goWare/Sentieri Selvaggi, 2020), Edoardo Ferrini, the author, tells us well about the peculiarities of the new language and the aesthetics produced by the process of rethinking new media.
Mutual interpenetration
In 1991 Marshall McLuhan highlights how the media dialogue and interfere with each other by mixing their languages and their aesthetics and modifying the human perceptive apparatus. They are not just external or exterior tools, but techno-cognitive prostheses, as de Kerckhove argues. While Bolter and Grusin, taking up the thesis of the Canadian author, coin the term remedy by virtue of which:
“Different media flow into each other”.
Or again:
"The representation of one medium within another is not an occasional artifice, but a fundamental characteristic of the new digital media, a real principle immanent in their evolution".
If we think of the smartphone, for example, it contains the function of an old telephone and also that of a computer or a cinema or a library.
Old and new media
In recent years there has been a strong debate on the peculiarities of new media, at least starting with the publication of Lev Manovich, entitled precisely The language of new media. What distinguishes them from the media in general?
First, the phenomenon of remedy within them it is stronger and more peculiar, even faster. Just think of the astonishing speed with which iPhones come out. Furthermore, computers, mobile phones and latest generation cameras use digital language, which allows old languages and formats to be transferred and transformed, digitised, a phenomenon which facilitates remediation as never before.
However, the problem does not stop there, because new media are hosted, amplified, expanded within the network, the Internet, which is the strongest social and cultural context of remediation, as can be understood by browsing YouTube, where those who often film he has the peculiarity of being both author and actor, as if the camera filter becomes opaque and one is observed in first person.
The substance of the remedy
Thus we begin to understand that the experience of remediation is increasingly internalized, as can be seen for example with the experience of multitasking, and it is worth repeating that it is something more profound and complex than a simple formal device.
Social media, to which the new media would correspond, are not simple tools or displays of popularity, because they immerse in an intimate relationship, of symbiotic correspondence between the form of the medium, its content and its message, to the point that also and above all the representation, for many exhibition, of oneself is a constitutive part of the media language.
The human being has "profiled" himself in the aesthetics of the media with which he builds his own image. He doesn't limit himself to looking at other people as happened with television, or portraying himself in a photo, where he, however, is portrayed by others.
He observes himself continuously, apparently according to his own point of view, up to the striking example of subjective visions, a real embodied gaze, at the basis of video games such as Call of duty or the launch video for Google Glass, One Day, analyzed by Ruggero Eugeni.
The new media as a prosthesis
It should be noted that this specific technology, centered in summary on virtual functions present in the glasses themselves, presents a type of identification that the accurate analysis of Dario Cecchi (in Isabella Pezzini, In the Google network. Practices, strategies and devices of the engine that changed our lives) is found in the case of Google Spotlight Stories, interactive simulations present on the net, in which the user, looking subjectively, embodies himself in the same gaze as the character, thus becoming a co-author and a co-protagonist.
Here too it is based on a symbiotic immersion of the real into the virtual and vice versa in which the individual tends to immerse himself completely in an augmented reality.
So the new media constitute, as Facebook perfectly exhibits, an unprecedented mirror-like prosthesis. Several films, among all Tindeed, they speak of the dramatic journey and journey from the superficial image of oneself to the depths of the ego, from the way in which others look at us and we would like to be looked at, to the gaze through which Emilio Garroni speaks.
Therefore with the new media also the self and the I are more and more inside the remediation and the phenomenon of the image of an image, which will be analyzed in the case of Scream 4. New media, from smartphones to computers, therefore have an immersive character.
The cancellation of the vehicle
The viewer does not do it from a window or a frame, he is inside, in all respects, as if he were becoming transparent with respect to himself and with respect to the medium itself. So much so that according to Bolter and Grusin remediation underlies hypermediation, which is precisely the opacity of the medium towards itself, towards other media, towards the user and towards reality itself.
Indeed according to Grusin (2017):
"Transparent immediacy foresees that the subject's contact with reality depends on the cancellation of the medium, which articulates, and therefore hides, the relationship between subject and world".
This saturation effect is found in simulated or simulated experiences in which reality and the self manifest themselves as a sort of mirror double with respect to what one wishes the prosthesis to simulate, without opening a critical or dialogic gap between the program, the subject and the reality that includes them.
In fact, as we will see later, the term and concept of simulation implies similarity, which however tends to be more simulacral than mimetic. This symbiotic saturation is often internal to the concept of artificial intelligence which hides two dangers: on the one hand there is the risk of thinking of the prosthesis as a sort of one's employee, and on the other the prosthesis, as a result of what has been said, is thought of as a narcissistic mirror, therefore completely transparent, with respect to one's self. This greatly weakens the process of conscious differentiation and self-conscious recognition.
Confidence and intimacy
Transparency also concerns the relationship of trust that is maintained with the medium. It is no coincidence that Grusin also believes that the media embody — he often uses the term embodied — an emotional life.
In fact, tastes, preferences, character traits are communicated to Google, and it reworks them, even bringing out a sort of model reader similar to "the person you didn't know you were", from the moment it discovers new attitudes or preferences by following suggestions or advice that the search engine provides.
In this sense, the transparency of the medium becomes synonymous with intimacy: secrets are also revealed, as in the case of personal phrases on Facebook.
From this point of view, as Google teaches, many social media take on the function of search engine-adviser, guardian-confidant - which is the most worrying -, promoter-encreaser-social guide - increase popularity - and also locator, just think of the various apps that are used to trace a route or locate a place.
radical mediation
Grusin returned to the issues presented, supporting a thesis of great interest. In fact he doesn't talk about mediation, But say radical mediation, meaning that human beings have always been constitutively in their own state, or evolutionary stage, of mediation, a concept that he primarily finds in the radical empiricism of William James.
Being mediated can be defined as a relational ontology which, according to the author, also concerns non-human organisms. From this point of view the body is our main medium, indeed it is the medium. It is no coincidence that several works that are the subject of this research underlie the question: which is my body? Question which creatures androids of Westworld they often arise implicitly.
According to Grusin, therefore, mediation is a process of subjectification because it is individuating. Indeed:
Mediation should not be understood as what is placed between already formed subjects, objects, actants or entities, but as a process, action or event that generates or determines the conditions for the emergence of subjects and objects, for locating entities within the world.
To then continue:
Understanding the affective and experiential nature of mediation, and not just the visual one, means thinking about our immediate affective experience of mediation as felt, embodied and close — not distant from us and therefore not illuminated or imagined, but experienced by us in as well as human and non-human embodied living creatures.
The existence of the technique
Man then is a contingent creature who relates to internal and external reality by projecting and extending himself within the latter. On the one hand, the discussion touches on an evolutionary theme, in the sense that the human animal adapts to the environment by modifying and anthropomorphizing it, from the caves of Lascaux to virtual interactive environments.
On the other hand, it poses an ontological question that rests its roots in various philosophical and mediological arguments: among all the being of Heidegger's technique according to which technique is precisely a proper and specific manifestation of the human being.
Without forgetting that even Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception (analyzed by Grusin), by virtue of which the seer is seen and vice versa, just as the body is also flesh, has a strong connection with the discourse advocated, not to forget then the strong resemblance between Grusin's radical mediation and the intentional "consciousness of", directed and projected towards the "objects" of experience, proposed by Husserl.
The Leib
Both Ponty and the German philosopher in fact have a subject in common, what German philosophy calls Body, or own body, which is not only a sensitive and sentient envelope, but the manifestation of a co-belonging with the experience that the body itself encounters, explores and manifests.
A concept similar to the aesthetic or ecstatic body which according to Sergej Ėjzenštejn is at the basis of montage, an idea widely taken up by Pietro Montani in his support of the mutual analogy between the propensity to aestheticize the human organism and its configuration in technical and technological prostheses which increase , enhance and integrate the same Body. The strongest and most engaging result of this whole process is immersiveness which is another way of saying transparency.
Il Body of man has never been exposed and projected inside and outside of himself as happened with the mobile screen of the cinema, in which the images move and furthermore are linked in a narration and in a montage.
The ancestor of new media: cinema
What was the medium capable of such immersiveness if not cinema? It is precisely from this implicit question that Lev Manovich's reflection begins according to which cinema is the progenitor of the computer which in turn is the parent of all the other new media: screen, images, movement, increased realism, opacity of the medium compared to the own being and to reality itself.
According to the author, the computer has inherited the aesthetic peculiarities of cinema by transferring them to subsequent media, among all mobile phones. The being within has expanded so much that such media are predominantly tactile, as the term touch screen indicates. The gaze is so immersive and all-pervading that it has become tactile.
The new media therefore propagate a particular realism by virtue of which the spectator actor (the broadcast yourself of YouTube) immerses himself in reality but through an interface and opaque, "transparent" prostheses, which are not seen or perceived, amalgamated with the environment, reaching out into everyday life.
The end of the Renaissance man
It is no coincidence that Derrick de Kerckhove spoke of the end of the Renaissance man. In the Renaissance and beyond, perspective dominated, which is both looking at a distance and distancing oneself from what one looks at, and above all revealing the symbolic mediation of the observer. A reality is portrayed and imitated, although the perspective perfectly emulates our way of seeing which is three-dimensional.
The most important follower of McLuhan believes that with the advent and development of new media the point of view has been replaced with the point of being. The tactile and immersive gaze is a being within one's own representations, no longer a look at a represented reality.
The outlook with new media has changed profoundly, from the first Apple computers that fit perfectly into the familiarity of the home environment with the apple symbol, up to the recent Google Glass with which it is possible to participate in virtual reality simulations directly by wearing them.
The arrival of artificial intelligence
We have even moved on to an even greater and more significant level because with artificial intelligence - perhaps an oxymoron, which I prefer to call connective - it is not the human being who makes the tools he creates think, but man thinks together and parallel to the media with which it is in contact, or even more anguishingly it is the machines that think for us.
The opacity, immediacy in their terminology, of the medium of which Bolter and Grusin speak is then twofold because on the one hand it is expressed in relation to reality itself in that the medium is immersed in it without revealing his own mediation or remediation, while from the something else takes place right between the instruments.
The smartphone is like a miniature cinema and like a computer, but the aesthetics of the three media has become transparent within one. One guiding word, therefore: hyperrealism.
Cinema incorporates all new media
And how does cinema react to all this, how does it incorporate the languages of other media? Remediation, translating literally, has digital as its privileged place and involves all the arts, especially cinema. The latter has to deal almost daily with new technologies, on the one hand because he feels besieged by them, on the other because by incorporating them he can modernize himself and draw new lifeblood from them — apart from the fact that they now irrevocably belong to the contemporary scenario and therefore it would be blindness not to take them back.
The effects are twofold: they concern films such as Murder live which incorporate the process of remediation within the story being told, or film like Inland Empire by David Lynch that are structured to be programmed not only in cinemas but in other media forms, for example "installations" within an exhibition or museum, or within the remediation.
The most important distinctive trait of the phenomenon, however, is that remediation and intermediality, or rather the coexistence of different levels within the medial and digital reproducibility, interact more and more starting with the plot of the films.
Because, if, starting from the plot, the events narrated put intermediality at the center as their constitutive character, the content of this, in order to be made explicit and translated, needs the activation of the remediation process.
Edward Ferrini he has a degree in philosophy and mainly deals with aesthetics in relation to cinema. He has been teaching history and philosophy for several years and, since September 2019, also the history of religions at the Endo-Fap Lazio, Don Orione in Rome. His interests have found an adequate framework in the initiatives of the cultural association of which he is president: Conviviality and Knowledge. The false mirror. The crisis of reality from Videodrome to Westworld is his first book.
