The medium is the message

After giving an oral report that may have included a PowerPoint presentation and possibly a handout one may be required to write a paper for the report. You would not present information in the same way in a PowerPoint as you would on a handout or when you delivered the content verbally. Because of the changes you make from one medium to the next, your audience perceives the information differently based on how it is delivered. Each of those elements, the report, the PowerPoint and the presentation, is a remediation of your original paper. 

Marshall McLuhan

Portrait by Yousuf Karsh. Copyright the Estate of Yousuf Karsh, California.

McLuhan is known for coining the expressions the medium is the message and the global village, and for predicting the World Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented




Remediation is the process of taking a text, whether it is a newspaper article, a story, a film or even something like a business proposal or a report, and translating it into a new medium. Remediation is based on the idea of the famous media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who once said that "the medium is the message."  This meant that how we perceive information changes based the way in which that information is presented.

Regardless of what kind of remediation you are taking on, it is vital to understand how the remediation process works. Audience is one of the most important elements of the remediation process, because the creator of the medium must take into consideration how the work will be understood and interpreted. By knowing how to interpret the most important ideas from the original text and by transferring them in such a way as to give new meaning to the interpretation without misrepresenting the original, you will be far more successful in conveying important ideas to your audience and in understanding how important the way you present your information is.

In libraries and information centers, remediation is a concept and idea whose time has come, cannot be wished away or be defeated. As volumes and volumes of materials are created for a subject topic, coalescing this information and putting it in a summarized form becomes necessary and more so for academic libraries where readers want to get the concept without being bombarded with pages of so many analogies just to achieve the same concept. We can call this type Text-to-Text Remediation

Another type is Text-to-Visual Remediation where you translate text into either a single image or a series of images (a video or slideshow). These two types of remediation fundamentally involve the same process—translating text into visuals. The purpose of a text-to-visual remediation is to convey the main ideas of the text with the use of visual images. Obviously you must pay attention to purpose and audience. Remediation should be an expression of your feelings about a particular text, but it should be rooted in an understanding of the original text, including the historical context out of which it came, and an application of rhetorical strategies—knowledge that that you should be able to eloquently defend in a reflection piece on the remediation.