Reflection on My Remediation
FINAL PROJECT – REMEDIATION
PART III – REFLECTION
For Dr. Sara Steger in HUSL 6384 Digital Rhetoric
By John Kay
October 24, 2011
Because I had emergency surgery for a ruptured appendix, missed a month of classes, and took Incompletes in all three of my courses, I returned to my original essay long after I wrote it. Entitled “Watson to Watson: The Social Effects of One-to-One Communication Technologies,” the essay looked at how people’s use of telephones, pagers, mobile phones for speaking, mobile phones for texting, instant messaging on computers, and email. My later fresh set of eyes and additional studying during the interim allowed me to modify my original essay. For example, I removed a mention of technological determinism because I learned that I had taken a social constructivism approach by analyzing the social effects.
For Part II, I chose video ( WATCH VIDEO HERE ) as my medium because I wanted to use the affordances of video. This medium allowed me to incorporate written text, still visual images, moving images, and music. I could order and pace the presentation of the material. I realized that I could neither just restate the words of the essay nor cover all of the topics of that paper; therefore, I selected one main point, i.e., the overblown fears arising from society’s prevalent technologically-deterministic approach to understanding the social effects of new one-on-one communication technologies have existed since the introduction of the telephone. Video’s “hybridity” (Mary Hocks, “Understanding Visual Rhetorics in Digital Writing Environments,” 637) allowed me to show, for instance, a scene from the movie You’ve Got Mail, display text, and play music.
I wanted the construction of the composition to put the viewer in the “audience stance” (Hocks, 635) of seeing that movie clip, reading about fears of meeting someone on the other end of the one-to-one communication technology, and concluding that the discussion was about email and instant messaging while creating the tension of showing visual images from the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s about the telephone and fears surrounding it. The reason for such juxtaposition was to illustrate and have the viewer experience the fact that the worries people have had about the social effects of email and instant messaging are nothing new. Video afforded me the opportunity to run two parallel vectors of rhetoric in ways that a strictly printed essay might not be able to do as effectively. Mary Hocks would say that video is a very “transparent” medium because audiences are very familiar with it and its use (Hocks, 632), such as for narratives.
The remediation of my essay into video altered my message because the affordances of video prompted me to emphasize the main point. It allowed the reader to become a viewer and hearer and experience the message in a new way. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin write, “What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 15). My video refashioned my initial printed essay, film, and music by including parts of them and placing them in the digital audio/visual environment. My final printed essay refashioned my ideas for the video because the video alerted me to my need to more clearly focus my argument. I thought that the experience of writing an essay, remediating it, and then reflecting on it was an appropriate way to bring a Digital Rhetoric course to a conclusion.
