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  • Essay / Mediacy and Hypermediatism - 1759

    In an increasingly mediated world, we, as a society, have fostered a culture fascinated by the coexistence of transparency and hypermediacy of digital technology. The constant expansion, progress and improvement of various forms of media has manifested itself in our omnipresent desire to achieve an intact and plausible form of reality, through the very act of augmenting the mediation through which it is represented . This objective is actively sought by digital users and producers. The development and rise of the Internet, particularly websites, provide prominent modern examples of the implementation of these concepts. Singer, songwriter and producer Pharrell Williams' recently launched website, "24 Hours of Happy" (http://24hoursofhappy.com/), is a rich embodiment of how immediacy functions under hypermedia. Furthermore, it illustrates the codependent role of these two concepts in attracting an audience based on the individual's desire to achieve an authentic experience of reality, paradoxically, through the very act of remediation. An adequate understanding of this argument requires clarification of terms. discussed. These terms will be defined according to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, both pioneering critics of new media, who closely examined the relationships and functions of these concepts in their book Remediation: Understanding New Media. Immediate and hypermedia are terms referring to logic, to the imperative on which the relationship between engagement and the medium is based. Immediacy refers to the producer's goal of making the mediation of the text transparent. Immediacy is associated with simultaneity, intuition and invisibility, and attempts to erase its representational qualities to provide a... middle of paper ......ies "immediate" in the context of an exclusively “happy” club. The project was ingenious in that it positioned Pharrell Williams as the name of this innovative work which quickly exploded, reaching over 9 million hits since its release in November 2013 and representing a significant and strategic step forward in his career. This essay defined the concepts of hypermediation, immediacy, and remediation, and how they function dependently as products of remediation. The “24 Hours of Happy” website is a strong paradigm of such a relationship, demonstrating its ability to seduce users on the basis of their desire for immediacy through the very multiplication of hypermediatism. This dual, somewhat contradictory relationship is a burgeoning development in today's media environment that will continue and intensify for as long as our culture's insatiable appetite for it will...