I came across a reading from David J Bolter about new media in the book Remediation: understanding new media that I think quite interesting how new media, new technology have changed our ways of reading and our literary skills. As I believe this helps me to understand deeper about hypertext which is also considered a kind of new media.

Bolter suggested in the first part of the reading that whenever one medium seems to have convinced viewers of its immediacy, other media try to appropriate that conviction . He stated that remediation did not begin with the introduction of digital media. The last several hundred years of Western visual representation all attempts to achieve immediacy by ignoring or denying the presence of the medium and the act of mediation.

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.

Although each medium promises to reform its predecessors by offering a more immediate or authentic experience, the promise of reform inevitably leads us to become aware of the new medium as a medium. Thus, immediacy leads to hypermediacy, the process of remediation makes us aware that all media are at one level a “play of signs”, which is a lesson that we take from poststructuralist literary theory. New digital media are not external agents that come to disrupt an unsuspecting culture. They emerge from within cultural contexts, and they refashion order media, which are embedded in the same or similar contexts.