Remediation

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Abstract
“This is not like TV only better,” says Lenny Nero in the futuristic film Strange Days. “This is life. It’s a piece of somebody’s life. Pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex. You’re there. You’re doing it, seeing it, hearing it . . . feeling it.” Lenny is touting a black-market device called “the wire” to a potential customer. The wire is a technological wonder that deserves Lenny’s praise. It fits over the wearer’s head like a skull cap, and sensors in the cap somehow make contact with the perceptual centers in the brain. In its recording mode, the wire captures the sense perceptions of the wearer; in its playback mode, the device delivers these recorded perceptions to the wearer. If we accept the popular view that the role of media is to record and transfer sense experiences from one person to another, the wire threatens to make obsolete all technologies of representation. Lenny mentions television, but we can extend his critique to books, paintings, photographs, film, and so on. The wire’s appeal is [End Page 311] that it bypasses all forms of mediation and transmits directly from one consciousness to another.

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