J. David Bolter

I started out really liking this book, mostly because it suggests a much-needed break from McLuhan and Ong. I appreciated the authors' rejection of technological determinism, and I was intrigued by their ideas of the complex interplay between immediacy and remediation. But then, around chapter three I realized they had put all their good stuff up front and really had nothing new to add. Also, while most of their points stand reasonably well, their examples are so woefully out of date... It's show more a little embarrassing to read them going on and on about how Virtal Reality is going to change the world, when in fact... no. Not at all. show less

Written in the late 1990s, this book is little worse for wear. It lays out a highly useful and understandable framework for how media borrow from each other and situate themselves in relation to other media. It is not difficult to fill in the blanks regarding more recent developments, and the authors' theories are not less useful for being dated. On the negative side, the book is a bit overlong; I'd agree with the below reviewer that the connections to critical theory can be superficial or show more dubious, and the ending chapters are not as strong as the rest of the book. However, this book addresses in detail a field of inquiry that is only touched upon by most of other sources I have read. I highly recommend it to anyone taking a theoretical approach to new media. show less

I would agree with the previous reviewers in their estimation of this book. It was a fascinating read, and useful inasmuch as its proposed framework is directly applicable to 'new media' today. It's interesting to trace the lineage of 'new media' through this text, and how we are continuing to remediate both new and old.

It is unfortunate that this book was published just on the cusp of many cultural events and artefacts that would have made it a stronger text, and perhaps gone a long way to show more proving many of its main hypotheses. Soon after it was published, movies like 'The Matrix' and 'Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within' were released. MUDs and MOOs gave way to the networked communities of Web 2.0 - social media. TiVo was born. Self-referential reality TV started to become wildly popular. 'The Sims' became the best-selling videogame of all time. 9/11 happened.

Considering all of the above, you can't help but read this book and feel disappointed. There was so much it could have tackled, so much for it to analyse, dissect and get its teeth into, if only it had been written even a year or two years later down the line. As it is, its left for us to fill in the gaps, to think about how the years of, say, 1999-2004 changed so profoundly the way we mediate, remediate and define ourselves in relation to the remediated/hypermediated world around us. show less

I read this book in my constant quest for more information that I can use for my masters paper.

Unfortunately, it didn't prove particularly useful, nor was it particularly interesting. It seemed quite dry to be honest, and dated with its large sections dedicated to hypertext (although, to be fair, the title did make it pretty clear that hypertext was surely going to be addressed more than just in passing).

However, for someone who is focusing on the technological aspect of writing in the show more computer age, this could be useful. show less