Remediation is the name of the game/Imitation is the highest form of flattery

…and the easiest way to learn the power of a tool! While my ability to link to various online sources gained momentum as the weeks of the Fall semester continued, my most creative spurts came from titling posts as you can see from any of the titles from October 2003, e.g., “Is anyone reading this blasted thing-a-ma-blog?”

Then I read this post by former and current classmate William and his choice of linking the word “trouble,” totally intrigued me. I believe Dr. Moxley also noted it in one of his weekly email assessments of our blogs, which also drew my attention to it. I had not considered the significance of choosing certain words to link and previously had only chosen the obvious: essay titles and names. From then on I’ve taken more time to think about which words to highlight when inserting the link I plan to share. I’ve progressed from this time in November 2003 with the word “here” to my more visually rhetorical practice of hyperlinking the posted picture. And no matter what computer you use to read my blog, if it is set to hover over links in a certain way or not, my blatant use of color [usually pink—see the comments to this post for a student asking me about that] to emphasize the links is now part of my practice.

Linking to me is the most important part of blogging and echoes what Jay David Bolter says about the remediation of print. I close this post with several key statements of his (44-45):

Hypertext is a process as much as a product…

In its emphasis on process and on the reader’s awareness of the medium, hypertext seems to belong to the literary tradition of modernism…

Electronic writing in general and hypertext in particular can be both old and new, because the process of remediation must acknowledge both their connection with and their difference from print…

New media are always new in their redeployment and refashioning of their predecessors…