In Other Words, Hello

I read with great interest last week’s announcement from Ben and Mena Trott, co-founders of Six Apart, Ltd., that they had merged their shop with VideoEgg. After the dust settles, the new entity will be known as “SAY Media, a modern media company.” Anil Dash’s “SAY, Goodbye to Six Apart,” for example, sheds light on his part in this transition. I haven’t looked too deeply into what motivates SAY Media; give it a week, right? It’s difficult to really know such things, anyway. Commenters responding to the smattering of Six Apart’s end-times disclosures suggest SAY Media is interested foremost in monetizing blog traffic by way of advertising. My first thought: best of luck.

My next thought is, Earth Wide Calamity!, this blog runs on Movable Type, one of Six Apart’s first blogging systems. If Six Apart disappears, will Movable Type also vanish into thin air? Early, findable answers are exactly what you would expect them to be: no, no, of course not. Movable Type and Typepad are making the transition right along with the Trotts. Nevertheless, there is a bit of anxious buzz floating around that SAY Media is concerned with easing the Typepad subscribers through the transition, but they don’t appear to be especially forthright with promises about Movable Type. The word on Movable Type is, in effect, “mum.” In fact, the SAY Media blog’s latest entry has as its title, “We Love Bloggers, We Love Typepad, We Want to Hear From You,”–a hand-patting “it will be okay” from Matt Sanchez, the new company’s CEO, who, curiously enough, has not himself responded to the comments.

For my own part in this anticipating of the worst, I’ll just hang around, waiting and seeing, until there is more definitive cause for concern (e.g., if this entry does not publish because SAY Media has corrupted my MT installation). Another way, as with much change-anxious worrying, rehearse a dozen times with a succession of deep breaths, “nothing happens.”

Bolter and Grusin – Remediation (1999) II

Let’s call this entry part two of three. I’m a bit behind (behind what? just
my own schedule), but I’m through the application chapters–the middle 140 pages
of B&G.  In the paragraph opening into the final section, "Self," B&G write
that these middle chapters are applications of remediation as a process. 
In their glossary, B&G define remediation this way:

remediation Defined by Paul Levenson as the "anthropotropic" process
by which new media technologies improve upon or remedy prior technologies. 
We define the term differently, using it to mean the formal logic by which new
media refashion prior media forms.  Along with immediacy and hypermediacy,
remediation is one of the three traits of our genealogy of new media. (273).

B&G discuss remediation as this logics-guided process involved with a variety
of media throughout section two: computer games (88), digital photography (104), photorealistic
graphics (114), digital art (132), film (146), virtual reality (160), mediated
spaces (168), the www (196), and ubiquitous computing (212).  In the final
section, "Convergence," B&G offer an explanation for more various push-pull
relationships among media.  Whereas remediation tends to describe a uni-directional
process of influence, convergences are akin to blends–multi-directional
shapings felt among media (where television flows into the www and the www flows
into television).  Convergence rel. to remediation: a sloshing media
spillway, a complex subversion of remediation’s teleology.

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