Remediation: Understanding New Media by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin is an impressive book. This book is divided to three sections: theory, media, and self. The first three chapters introduce the concept of remediation and the theory behind it. There are two main ideas: immediacy and hypermediacy. To me, the concept of immediacy is derived from McLuhan’s article, The medium is The Message. This concept tries to deminish the border of content and media. The content is the media in another form. The authors use virtual reality (VR) as an example. VR applies computer graphics to make users feel VR is real and try to erase the boundary of the virtual and real world. Another concept is hypermediacy which tries to apply technology to make media work better, such as newspaper Web sites which have links that the readers can choose to jump to the topics that they are interested in. Computer games are a good example of starting with concept of immediacy through film and extending it to hypermediacy through television.

To survive, old media must try to improve themselves such as the way CNN news uses their Internet logo on their TV broadcast. New media can bring the benefits of old media to their new form such as Web sites apply the concept of displaying the most important inforamtion early in the article so that one can move quickly to another article that he or she is interested in. The readers of Web sites can see the highlights of Web sites at first glance with out scrolling down to the bottom of the page. I can’t argue about whether old or new media will win. I think they will go together and help each other to shape the characteristics of the new media for the future.