I study how new (digital) media affect and are affected by earlier media and media forms, including film, television, and print.
That work with Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print (first edition 1991; second edition 2001 by Lawrence Erlbaum. Writing Space examined the computer’s place in the history of symbolic (textual) media. In the second edition, I argue that digital hypertext is the remediation of the printed book.
Published between the first and second editions of Writing Space, Remediation: Understanding New Media (coauthored by Richard Grusin, MIT Press, 1999) focuses on the relationship between visual digital expressions (such as computer games and the World Wide Web) and earlier media forms (such as film and television). We argue that digital forms both borrow from and seek to surpass earlier forms, and we give this process the name “remediation.”
Windows and Mirrors (coauthored with Diane Gromala, MIT Press, 2003) argues that digital art is a radical form of interface design. Interfaces reflect the dichotomy, discussed in Remediation, between the aesthetics of immediacy and hypermediacy.
One of my two current book projects, whose working title is The Digital Plenitude, is scheduled for publication with MIT Press in the spring of 2019. The book focuses on two developments in the second half of the twentieth century have that helped to define our media culture in the twenty-first: the decline of cultural hierarchy and the rise of digital media:
In addition I have authored or coauthored numerous papers on digital media, see my cv for a complete list.
My blog, Mechanical Dances, will give you an idea of my current work in media studies.
