Blog Remediate

DUBLIN -- The longest-running and most widely read Irish weblogs provide an important function--they remediate information. Unlike personal diaries or cargo cult sites that merely narrate events or regurgitate press releases, effective blogs interpret information and place a first-person stamp of authenticity on the coverage of items. In doing these things, they add value to information by remediating it.

Remediation is a trademark characteristic of weblogs but it is hardly a new idea. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that new visual media achieve their cultural significance by refashioning such earlier media as perspective painting, photography, film, and television.¹ Earlier media have refashioned one another: photography remediated painting, film remediated stage production and photography, and television remediatd film, vaudeville and radio.

Blogs add a twist when remediating information--they often skewer the original direction of an idea by impressing on the information a meaning different from that of the original author. So an information release about Google's AutoLink feature may trumpet the effectiveness of the tool. Once blogs remediate the initial press release, a totally different theme often emerges on top of search engine results. That's because bloggers who share the same feeling of hesitation about the Google feature will often point to a seminal essay on the topic. Once 15 or more bloggers hyperlink the same keywords to the same URL, the information at that URL gains value. Linking keywords to a URL is one way to remediate information. Sociologists sometimes refer to this as a "transactional" effect.² In the Google AutoLink example, the company announcement about AutoLink would be suppressed by or surounded by the remediated information.

New bloggers quickly cop onto the effects of remediation. They see the impacts when using search engines. Over time, active bloggers develop an appreciation of the links, comments and trackbacks that help create a social semiotic structure among bloggers. Then the inevitable happens: the virtual world of blogging is remediated into a physical realm of a casual meeting or a blogger conference. Electronic jabbering defers to polite conversation. Often what started as online discussion finishes as a casual chat, remediated by real world factors.

---

¹Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
²Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images; The Grammar of Visual Design, London: Routledge, 1996.
x_ref1256