Log-in53
There are two paradoxes at work here. One is that hypermedia could ever be thought of as achieving the unmediated. Consider again the music spectacle CD-ROMs like the Emergency Broadcast Network with its surfeit of images and sounds that bombard the viewer. The idea of excess has been part of the popular music culture for decades. At first the excess was achieved simply by turning up the volume, until the sound could be felt as well as heard. More recently, the stage productions of popular musicians have emphasized visual spectacle and the acknowledgment of multiple media.
There are two paradoxes at work here. One is that hypermedia could ever be thought of as achieving the unmediated. Consider again the music spectacle CD-ROMs like the Emergency Broadcast Network with its surfeit of images and sounds that bombard the viewer. The idea of excess has been part of the popular music culture for decades. At first the excess was achieved simply by turning up the volume, until the sound could be felt as well as heard. More recently, the stage productions of popular musicians have emphasized visual spectacle and the acknowledgment of multiple media.
The excessive, highly self- conscious video style of MTV is one result, and the music spectacle CD-ROMs obviously remediate MTV. The excess of media becomes an authentic experience, not in the sense that it corresponds to an external reality, but rather precisely because it is does not feel compelled to refer to anything beyond itself. As with MTV, the viewer experiences such hypermedia not through an extended and unified gaze, but through directing her attention here and there in brief moments. The experience is one of the glance rather than the gaze, a distinction that Bryson (1983) has drawn in order to understand the semiotics of Western painting (cf. Bryson 1981).
The excessive, highly self- conscious video style of MTV is one result, and the music spectacle CD-ROMs obviously remediate MTV. The excess of media becomes an authentic experience, not in the sense that it corresponds to an external reality, but rather precisely because it is does not feel compelled to refer to anything beyond itself. As with MTV, the viewer experiences such hypermedia not through an extended and unified gaze, but through directing her attention here and there in brief moments. The experience is one of the glance rather than the gaze, a distinction that Bryson (1983) has drawn in order to understand the semiotics of Western painting (cf. Bryson 1981).