If the medium is the message, what does remediation do to meaning?

            The Circle was, of course, a highly enjoyable and enlightening—not to mention acclaimed—book. The movie, however, seems to have fallen far short of expectations. I can’t help but compare this discrepancy to the core concept of our class: thinking critically about new media. After my show-and-tell presentation, Rose mentioned that it was refreshing to have a presentation on an older medium, and reading the reviews of The Circle reminded me of that point. Marshall McLuhan coined the popular phrase “The medium is the message,” but the case of The Circle brings to mind a similar, yet distinct, issue: if the medium is the message, what does remediation do to meaning?

            Given my interest in programming and related fields, this makes me think of data compression and conversion. Most types of data compression are “lossy,” meaning that they sacrifice some of the original information in the interest of reducing file size. An interesting side effect of this is the emergence of “artifacts,” or added pieces of incorrectly interpolated information, when a file is converted from a lossy, compressed format to an uncompressed format. (On a side note, archives such as .zip files are lossless, so there’s no need to worry about losing information by using them.) Similarly, converting information between different file types can sometimes cause a slight loss of quality because of differences in how the information is encoded.

            Bringing this discussion of file encoding back to The Circle, the conversion from book format to movie format is, in some ways, analogous to a conversion from one file type to another. While a book can easily narrate a character’s thoughts, for example, a movie must find some other method of conveying the same information in a fluid manner. Conversely, where a movie can easily display a complicated scene, it takes a book much longer to describe the same scene. Therefore, any information originally designed for one of these formats will be difficult to effectively convert to the other. A movie adaptation of a book—the usual case for this type of remediation—will therefore encounter two dilemmas: it must find a way to convey thoughts and thematic narration through visual and auditory media, and it must keep any “artifacts”—added visual or auditory information which was not described by the book—in the spirit of the original work. If these two vital tasks are not done well, the final product will suffer.

            In addition to this analogue to file conversion, the limited amount of time available for a commercially viable movie presents a similar analogue to file compression. Although, as they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” books tend to be much longer in the first place: a 156,240-word novel such as The Circle could, by the logic of that aphorism, take 156 scenes to fully convey as a movie. On top of this, all dialogue must be conveyed at the rate of actual speech in a movie, meaning that long conversations will take much longer to thus convey than they would as text.

            Considering these factors together, a book with as much thematic depth and introspection as The Circle must be handled with great finesse if it is to be effectively translated into a movie. While such a feat is demonstrably possible, given how many other books have been effectively adapted into movies, it is perhaps understandable, though disappointing, that some directors would fall short of success in so sensitive a task.