My work in media history and theory began with Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print (first edition 1991; second edition 2001 by Lawrence Erlbaum. Writing Space examined the computer’s place in the history of symbolic (textual) media. In the second edition, I argue that digital hypertext is the remediation of the printed book.

Published between the first and second editions of Writing Space, Remediation: Understanding New Media (coauthored by Richard Grusin, MIT Press, 1999) focuses on the relationship between visual digital expressions (such as computer games and the World Wide Web) and earlier media forms (such as film and television). We argue that digital forms both borrow from and seek to surpass earlier forms, and we give this process the name “remediation.”

With Blair MacIntyre, Maribeth Gandy, and Petra Schweitzer, I am also reexamining Benjamin's concept of aura. We want to see how aura (or the decay of aura) manifests itself in new media forms, such as augmented and mixed reality. Our current paper is entitled: “New Media and the Permanent Crisis of Aura.”