Mediacy And Hypermediacy

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In an increasingly mediated world, we as a society have fostered a culture fascinated with the coexisting transparency and hypermediation of digital technology. The constant expansion, advancement and improvement of varying forms of media has manifested in our ubiquitous desire to reach an untouched, plausible form of reality, through the very act of augmenting the mediation through which it is represented. Both users and producers of digital technology actively seek out this objective. The development and rise of the Internet, in particular websites, serve as prominent modern examples of these concepts at work. Singer, songwriter and producer Pharrell Williams’ recently debuted website, “24 Hours of Happy” (http://24hoursofhappy.com/) is a rich embodiment of the operation of immediacy under hypermediacy. Furthermore, it exemplifies these two concepts’ codependent role in appealing to an audience on the basis of the individual’s desire to reach an authentic experience of reality, paradoxically, through the very act of remediation.
An adequate understanding of this argument requires clarity regarding the terms discussed. These terms will be defined according to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, both pioneering critics in New Media, who closely examined the relations and functions of such concepts in their book, Remediation: Understanding New Media. Both immediacy and hypermediacy are terms referring to logic, the imperative on which the relationship between the engager and the medium rests. Immediacy refers to the producer’s goal of the text’s mediation being rendered transparent. Immediacy is associated with simultaneity, intuition and invisibility, and attempts to erase its representative qualities to provide ‘immediate’ a...

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...ies as a part of an exclusively ‘happy’ club. The project was ingenious in the way that it positioned Pharrell Williams as the name to this innovative work which quickly blew-up, attaining over 9million hits since its November 2013 release, and representing a significant and strategic advancement in his career.
This essay has defined the concepts of hypermediacy, immediacy and remediation, and the way that they operate dependently as products of remediation. The website “24 Hours of Happy” is a strong paradigm of such a relationship, demonstrating its ability to appeal to users on the basis of their desire for immediacy through the very multiplication of hypermediacy. This dual, somewhat contradictory relationship is an advancing development in today’s media environment that will continue and intensify as long as our culture’s insatiable appetite for it does.

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