[Image: Remediation: Understanding New Media by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin] “[...] (F)ar from being a complete and revolutionary break with the past, new media maintain many intimate connections with old media, technologies, practices and (electromechanical) infrastructures and spaces (telephone, broadcasting, electricity, highway, streets, airline, logistics systems, and so forth). Therefore, the so-called ‘information age’ is best considered not as a revolution, but as a complex and subtle amalgam of new technologies and media fused on to, and ‘remediating’, old ones (Bolter and Grusin, 2000: 183) …

As Bolter and Grusin suggest: [Cyberspace] is very much a part of our contemporary world and … it is constituted through a series of remediations. As a digital network, cyberspace remediates the electric communications networks of the past 150 years, the telegraph and the telephone; as virtual reality, it remediates the visual space of painting, film, and television; and as social space, it remediates such historical places as cities and parks and such ‘nonplaces’ as theme parks and shopping malls. Like other contemporary telemediated spaces, cyberspace refashions and extends earlier media, which are themselves embedded in material and social environments. (2000: 183)

[...] In their obsession with the ethereal worlds of new media – with the blizzards of electrons, photons and bits and bytes on screens – most new media researchers and commentators have ignored consistently the fact that it is real wires, fibres, ducts, leeways, satellite stations, mobile towers, web servers, and – not to be ignored – real electricity systems, that make all of this possible. All these are physically embedded and located in real places. They are expensive. They are profoundly material.

[...] Above all, while there is no doubt that new media can act as ‘prostheses’ to extend human actions, identities and communities in time and space, it does not follow that the human self is ‘released from the fixed location of the body, built environment or nation’. Rather, ‘the self is always somewhere, always located in some sense in some place, and cannot be totally unhoused’ (Kaplan, 2002: 34).

Crucially, the social construction and experience of the body and geographical space and place actually grounds and contextualize the applications and uses of new technologies. As cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove suggests: The urban world networked by [Bill] Gates’ technologies strung out on the wire is not disconnected, abstract, inhuman; it is bound in the places and times of actual lives, into human existences that are as connected, sensuous and personal as they ever have been. (Cosgrove, 1996: 1495)

[...] (N)ew media technologies are becoming so miniaturized and embedded into the artefacts of daily urban life – cars, toys, homes, streets, etc – that they often become less visible as separate artefacts and are experienced more subtly through their fusion into the wider material culture of urban society…” From Beyond the ‘Dazzling Light’: From Dreams of Transcendence to the ‘Remediation’ of Urban Life - A Research Manifesto by STEPHEN GRAHAM, Newcastle University, UK, 2004. [via]