Isn't it strange that our desire for newer and ever more dazzling media machines is equaled only by our wish to escape them? From mathematical perspective to the camera obscura, from photography to cinema -- television, the internet, virtual reality environments and all the more far-out sorts of artificial intelligence -- innovations in media have always been driven by the desire to overcome mediation. Whether it is the frame, the wire, location, bodies or simply physical presence that it eliminates, each new device promises to deliver the same content as its predecessor, only more immediately, which is to say without the clumsy medium in which the signal had been trapped. Jay Bolter and Robert Grusin have shown how this desire to escape media by means of media has developed according to a logic that they call "remediation." Television gives us everything film offered, but without the apparatus of the projector and the centralized theater. The laptop accomplishes what the portable computer was supposed to do, just as the PDA puts us in touch with everything the laptop promised but failed to deliver. And now wireless technology promises to accomplish all of this without the restrictions of any centralized location at all.

Bolter and Grusin's McLuhanesque thesis is useful for understanding the history of information technology, but it raises still more interesting questions about the nature of mediation per se. After all, what is a medium? Why is it necessary? Is it? Why the endless desire to eliminate it in the name of immediacy? What are the wider social and political consequences of the desire for immediacy? As long as we remain focused on questions of media ownership or the meaning of messages, we miss our deeply tortuous relation with the fact of mediation itself. Media are at once necessary means of communication and -- since they can always be speeded up, rationalized and made more efficient -- obstacles in the way of a more effective delivery of information. [...]