A new label for new media: demediation

In many of my media-studies courses, we usually begin by underlining the idea that all communication is mediated. Some students initially resist this. They see conversation and face-to-face interactions as direct, unmanaged, unmediated — communing rather than communicating. Once we get going, though, they learn to see the mediation in play even here: gestures and visuals, language itself, social forces, and the very spaces of interaction. There is no mind meld. There’s always a mediator.
 
Many emerging media, however, would like their users to think like those hesitant students — to experience the pre-programmed interactions of their technologies as unmediated, to ignore the inherent and carefully managed structure of the encounter, to assume that the communication is direct and free of outside influence. Thus the rapid development of digital channels that seem more “natural.” ChatGPT and other AI systems free users from having to learn a particular communication code; instead of mastering the art of the Boolean query in order to maximize Google results, ChatGPT speaks our language, as it were. Ask it a complete, “normal” question, and receive an almost human response rather than formatted results. Siri, Alexa, and other voice assistants create seemingly interpersonal encounters via natural language, as if we’re conversing easily with another subject rather than interrogating a bot. Only when the systems make mistakes do they become more visible in the exchange and remind us that, oh right, I’m talking to a machine.
 
To further understand this kind of situation — and especially in the context of my investigations related to digital holograms, which only succeed as communication if their mediating apparatus is similarly hidden from the user’s experience — it may be useful to adopt a theory that was coined in the context of literature and art and adapt it within media studies: demediation.

This brings up a primary challenge in scholarship, which is making the lexicon conform to our ideas. We often have to get creative — make up words, fuse them together, write new definitions for existing terms. (My own research focuses on holograms, a word coined by a physicist in 1948, though that original definition was utterly changed by Star Wars, and I often write about holosubjects experiencing holopresence. I even dropped this term in a previous post!)  Several years ago, literature and film scholar Garrett Stewart coined “demediation” to explain a particular cultural process he recognized occasionally happening to books.
 
It's something you may have experienced. You’re in a museum. Inside a glass case lies an old book. Maybe it’s open, showing off some artful medieval script, or perhaps it’s just there to be judged by its cover. Either way, it’s not there to be read. In the context of that museum display, that book does not exist for the purpose of its original media form. It has ceased to operate as a codex and has become instead an aesthetic object. It is no longer media. It has been “demediated.”

Demediated books in a Disneyland shop window. (Conner)

Stewart’s deft article from 2010 describes such a book as a “neutered textual shape” (410), and he unfolds his concept of demediation as “the fundamental transformation involved in bringing the book object into museum space” (413). He sings the blues for books rendered unreadable and the “the felt absence of usable text” (426), ultimately defining his term as “the process by which a transmissible text or image is blocked by the obtruded fact of its own neutralized medium” (413). Throughout his article, you can almost see his fingerprints on the glass as he reaches for the unreachable. He recognizes the book as a book, a text to be read, but his conditioned instinct is denied by the museum’s primacy of materiality.
 
Stewart’s concept as explicated focuses on the aesthetic object rather than the failed medium. But an early footnote provides this idea an introduction to media studies. He acknowledges the similarity of his own coinage to an early and highly influential media concept: remediation, ye olde theory from Bolter & Grusin that aided understanding in the 1990s of “new” media’s usage of older forms in order to gain footholds with contemporary users. That is, a word-processing app screens its text on simulated 8.5-by-11-inch “pages,” regardless of whether that text will be manifested on actual paper; we recognize a “page,” though, so we’re more comfortable adapting to the new digital practices. Stewart aligns his own concept to Bolter & Grusin’s this way: “Instead of [their] layering of former by present functions, what I am calling demediation peels away the message service, leaving only the material support” (413).
 
In explaining some unique media effects of digital holograms, I’ve similarly nodded toward remediation as exactly the opposite of that: the peeling away of material primacy to foreground only the messaging service. In squaring remediation with its two component parts, immediacy and hypermediacy, Bolter & Grusin’s initial theory likewise nods to the black-boxing of technologies — hiding the internal workings in order to concentrate user attention on the interface experience — and the apparent magic of fresh, remediating machines, which transform visible, time-sucking practices into more immediate results (e.g., instead of removing the film canister, delivering it to the Fotomat booth, and waiting a week for the pictures to be developed, we snap the photo and see the result immediately on our smartphone). Making the mediation less visible makes its encounters more immediate and present, makes the communication act seem less mediated, more interpersonal, like a real-time, face-to-face exchange. So: pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, only the image and sound of the great and powerful Oz.
 
In 2019, two scholars forged a more explicit link between Bolter & Grusin’s remediation and Stewart’s demediation, even though they, too, held their ground by applying the latter within the field of literature. In an argument about the nature of transmedia storytelling, Jan Baetens & Domingo Sánchez-Mesa also call out remediation’s immediacy, “which tends to highlight the (relative) independence of a medium’s content,” and hypermediacy, “which stresses the (temporary) opacity of the medium’s material structure,” as working in concert to facilitate “the possible dissociation of content and medium.” They then declare that “the concept of demediation should not be limited specifically to contemporary art … but that it is something that may prove key to a better understanding of what happens in other fields, as well,” and they proceed to carry the theories into their own analysis of literary tactics (275). But before they double-down on their own project, they note that “Stewart does not discuss issues of digitization, while the link between demediation and digitization is frequently mentioned in debates on digital culture” (275). To index those debates, they cite a single source, N. Katherine Hayles’ iconic How We Became Posthuman, which does not contain the word “demediation” but is a watermark text in discussions of virtuality, specifically how what Stewart calls a “messaging service” has become disembodied from material media — or at least made to seem that way.
 
So I propose bringing Stewart’s original term fully into conversation about issues of digitization — especially imagery — and to, as Baetens & Sánchez-Mesa pioneered, introduce and nurture the label of demediation within the field of media studies. I already bring the communication philosophy of Vilém Flusser to bear on my studies of digital hologram encounters — specifically, his category of the technical image, and his claims that this emerging communication form complicates the materiality of media and the rise of seemingly “immaterial culture.” I say “seemingly” because, in a couple of ways, tech like AR and digital holograms are still wholly material apparatuses delivering fully embodied experiences — they’re just designed to seem otherwise. The immateriality of Flusser’s “immaterial culture” is more phenomenological than anything; likewise, as Baetens & Sánchez-Mesa point out, Stewart’s definition of demediation is really the opposite of immateriality. Turning actual objects and subjects into digital imagery does not separate that imagery from the same materiality of its antecedents; in fact, such imagery is usually programmed specifically to function in similar ways — the e-book is a text to be read (with pages that turn), the AR video screen is positioned on a wall just like an actual TV, the dead rapper is resurrected on the concert stage where he lived. That book could be a cloud, that virtual TV could float anywhere, and 2.0pac could have performed atop the Grand Canyon. They didn’t, precisely because of the very materiality that haunts them.
 
The final salvo from Baetens & Sánchez-Mesa:

Demediation’s materiality, however, is not ‘purely’ material either. As Stewart’s analysis convincingly shows, the peeling away of the message service is also a mechanism that makes room for new forms of meaning once the demediated object is appropriated in other contexts. … To put it more bluntly, what the persistence of materiality in Stewart’s definition stresses is the illusion that one can get rid of a medium’s materiality. (276)

This presents a highly useful conceptual lens for scholarship related to emerging media and screen technologies. Holograms are ghostly, 3D but see-through. Encounters with their spectral image form are initially uncanny and odd (often making us feel like fellow ghosts). But they nonetheless are present as material objects manipulated by gesture (e.g., the entities within view of, say, a HoloLens) or subjects situated into human social relationships (the Star Trek Doctor as a full-fledged member of the crew participating in adventures, or the Holocaust holograms answering spectator questions and educating the public through their historical memory). The label of demediation assists my own efforts to better understand these technologies — seeing them as systems that intentionally erase signs of their mediation, so that the interface is encountered in a context that is more interpersonal than the conditioned experience with media, more “you” than UX. Indeed, by flipping Stewart’s original thinking — by foregrounding the message over the material support — other things obtrude worth attending to, especially within a similarly altered context of encounter. Demediation may be an aesthetic triumph and an ideological problem.