Remediation, Immediacy, Hypermediacy; An Understanding

It's pretty clear that the theory of Remediation is a difficult one to grasp, we felt though that it was an important one in terms of our project, and so it falls upon my head to try and explain it.

The theory of Remediation has two main concepts; Immediacy, and Hypermediacy. The concept of Immediacy is the presentation of media with an invisible frame almost. The idea being that the medium is so immediate that the audience forgets the frame around it, and becomes immersed in whatever they are seeing. Skysports is a good example of this, audiences nowadays can become so immersed in the world of skysports, and their Remediation, (the bringing together and reinventing of many forms of media) that it is easy to forget that the event is being presented through a media frame. In my own experience, people have even been playing football themselves, and admitted that they were 'almost waiting for the replay' of the event. The line between what is real, and what is a media form, gets blurred by the immediacy.

Hypermediacy on the other hand, pulls the audience away from the medium by reminding the audience in various ways, that this is a form of media, almost snapping the audience out of their immersion, giving a different perspective on the form. After being introduced to this concept of remediation, I was reminded of it during an episode of Scrubs that I happened to be watching. In the Episode, JD is seen watching Elliot, at which point the Janitor steps in to express his opinion on the two of them, stating that he thinks it is pathetic and that they aren't exactly Ross and Rachel. This moment snaps the audience out of the immersed scrubs world that they are in, and reminds them about the tv show friends. The mention of another sitcom reminds the veiwer that they are only watching a sitcom, before the Janitor then explains that of course, he was talking about a Dr Ross and Dr Rachel who work in the hospital with them, reinstating the immersion. I have added this clip to our Video links so that you can see what I am going on about. Since the video bar will not keep the same video for more than 10 minutes, if the video bar is showing more than one clip, the video can also be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wywqD5JvGXE

It is specifically this idea of Hypermediacy that is particularly relevant to our project. Will people still watch anything if it is abundantly clear to them that it is just a form of media, and they are given very little chance to become immersed the immediacy. These ideas were also explored by John Cage, as well as Guy Debord, who looked at creating flims in which nothing really seemed to ever happen. The idea being that audiences are captivated by conclusions, and as such, when these conclusions are not achieved, the audience becomes immediately aware of the form that they are watching. That is the theory of course, but whether or not it works is always