I agree with Bolter and Grusin’s argument that despite their attempt to efface themselves, media are material artifacts that cannot be separated from reality. Bolter and Grusin believe that all media remediate the real, and since it is impossible to destroy the real, it is therefore impossible to destroy mediation. While some may argue that we have come close to effacing the real through technologies such as virtual reality, VR is instead a material artifact that remediates the desire for transparent immediacy, and also the male gaze described by Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The male gaze refers to the way visual arts are structured around a male viewer, and the tendency in cinema and visual culture to depict the world …show more content…
In networked media, this also involves the remediation of identity. For example, early online identities were often kept completely anonymous. A user could create a username and profile, but there was little focus on the user’s “real” identity outside of the computer. The user’s identity was instead focused on how they chose to perform it. These online identities were still based on interests and involvement within bigger online communities, but the user’s life outside of the screen was not a priority the way it is today. With the introduction of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, identity has been completely remediated to instead focus on the user’s real …show more content…
The film deals with the loss of privacy in the digital age, and examines the effects of media on personal identity through Harris’ human experiments. Harris believes that the public will eventually trade their privacy for connection and recognition. While both McLuhan and Meyrowitz offer illuminating arguments that can be used to analyze We Live in Public, I think Meyrowitz is better suited to advance a critical reading of the film because he emphasizes the effects of media on the “situational geography” of social