Remediation

In Remediation, Bolter and Grusin note that remediation is the “representation of one medium in another.” Of course, everything is a conglomeration of what came before it. Everyone was sure that ebooks would destroy physical books, but book sales are still high if not higher. At one time, writing was regarded as killing orality and therefore thinking. Everything is subsumed by advances in technology, becoming a part of the history of the new form or technique. 

I’m especially interested in Bolter and Grusin’s discussion of transparency. Because I teach document and web design, emphasizing transparency is essential to skill development. I’ve always seen the awareness of transparency to be the difference between a novice and an expert. I’m currently writing about expertise and competency in Technical Communication so, I couldn’t help but connect the two ideas. The key difference between a novice and an expert is, I think, a difference in transparency—it is always difficult to see the transparency in the expert’s making. The novice often shows signs of making with such characteristics as misalignment, lack of white space, inappropriate font choices, and, more often than not, the use of too many effects (e.g., the use of bold, underline, and capital letters to signify a heading). An expert’s work disappears into a finely crafted finished product. Nothing needs adjustment.

When learning web design, for example, the novice is highly sensitive to the procedures because, I believe, it is difficult to learn design at the same time as she is learning the tools until the novice is somewhat familiar with how to use the tool. This is not to say that the novice doesn’t incorporate design principles; it is moreso that the novice just doesn’t know how to control the software enough to realize a certain design. They are too “aware of the process of construction” (p. 38) that their knowledge of the tools becomes transparent. They act without thinking about how to do it. In a way similar to learning a foreign language (i.e., if you can think in the language you got it), when the thinking about the tool dissolves into using the tool, you got it. I think that in the beginning, students are trying to listen to everything all at once (design principles and software instruction) feeling a sense of being overwhelmed or in information overload. In my classes, this perspective is why I teach the tool, unlike a lot of my colleagues, to help novice students feel comfortable enough to hear design instruction. When we get to Dreamweaver later in the semester, you will see that I take students through the construction of a basic framework for a website in order to get them to see the whole picture as opposed to teaching about links, inserting images, text manipulation, and so on. There is a lot of talk in my field about whether to teach the tools in class or have students learn the tools on their own. I prefer to do a mixture by combining tool and design knowledge.