Immediacy media

"Virtual reality is immersive, which means that it is a medium whose purpose is to disappear." (Bolter, 2000, p. 21)

Immediacy media is the attempt to try and convince the user of the technology that it is not a machine but is instead just a natural process of life. It attempts to hide any evidence that it is a machine doing different functions but is a living organism that can do what you want it to in the easiest possible way it can. It leads you into a false sense that it is not in fact going through designed programmes that it has been made to follow but instead, seamlessly does them as if it was breathing for you or I.  

Furthermore other technologies such as smart phones we can also witness the seamless nature that we have become use to in our devices. With the touch screen that the majority of smartphones use today we can do whatever we want with just one swipe of out finger. As use the touch screen it feels a though the movements of our fingers on it is more natural than pressing a button. We now do not see it as a device but as an extension of ourselves.

"... ten years ago we thought of computers exclusively as numerical engines... we now think of them also as devices for generating images..." (Bolter, 2000, p. 23)

Computers now appear to us to be more like canvas' to create new pieces of art, instead of the powerful calculators that they originally were designed as. We begin to see them as creative tools that we can use to help express ourselves in new ways. We can use them to create pieces of art that appear to be as realistic as possible without having to use another piece of technology such as a camera to take a photograph with. Tecnology has evolved over the years to become more than a machine, it can now be seen as a brand new creative organism.


Bibliography:
Bolter, J. D., (2000) Remediation: Understanding New Media, MIT Press

The Mighty Morphin' Desktop

An underling factor found inside Bolter's book, Remediation: Understanding New Media, is that the human mind can hide certain factors of reality right in front of your very eyes. What I'm talking about is the transformation or the "morphing" ability found with in our computer desktops. Our desktops don't just morph into a cat or a dog but into the fragmented realm in which we use to perceive time and space. In doing so it becomes a technique in "making the interface "transparent" and therefore more "natural"" (Bolter, 2000, p32) as well as making it an extension of our minds rather then our bodies.  

The metamorphosis begins with the contextual similarities to a physical object such as "file folders, sheets of paper, in-box, trash basket, etc" (Bolter, 2000, p23). Bolter conveys that this is down to a ramification that we need natural formats to help us understand new concepts. The desktop isn't a new concept but the way in which different software manufactures create their own desktop to help/interfere in the arbitrary nature of your minds. Now this doesn't mean we cant control new formats brought into our lives, more the fact that we need the natural formats to sync with the application in which we can again morph to a better future.

The morphing factor in this text is a symbolic factor that helps show the ideals of change and how we create three forms of marketing our personal woes of this transparent state. Form one is about the change in which the user becomes the desktop, the next form is the actual connection between the user and the desktop. The last form brings the transparency to stop by letting the user aware of it's unnatural state. Bolter has a similar point where he highlight the user is "brought back into contact with the interface" and they learn "to read just as she would read any hypertext" (Bolter, 2000, p33) creating this imbalance of pure and fictional.

This ideal has to become a conjunction of two forms the real and the fiction. If we cannot get over the metamorphosis then we can use our computers and desktops to their full advantage. Just like any form of window is transparent, so most we.

Bibliography:

Bolter, J.D. (2000) Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press)