J. David Bolter

along with hackers by steven levy this book illuminates the mind of a computer programmer and hammers home the philosophy of programming. but its many other things. the author tracing the movement away from oral to written culture, manually written books to printing, printing to computing, the nuances lost at each step and new nuances gained, how writing/reading affects assimilation of ideas as opposed to hearing/listening is profound. my only complaint it lays it all at the feet of them greek poster boys: aristotle & plato in particular. its always about 'western culture', of course says so on the title, but almost completely ignores the 'east' and its minds, one wonders does the evolved mind begin [and end] with greece. its really cool that the author wrote this book about the programmer's mind in that year of 1984 when mainstream programming was just beginning with the recent release of the IBM PC and Mac. after all these years it remains true.… (more)

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 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.… (more)

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 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.… (more)