What Does This Mean for Us and Our Future?

Now that we’ve explored the remediated realities of Moss, Abed, Codex, and even ourselves, what does that all mean? Well I think it’d be helpful to go back and discuss what I briefly touched on in a previous post about what commonalities the three characters have with each other.

In that post I mentioned that:

• All three of these characters are considered to be “weird” or “different” by the other characters of their respective shows. Often times this “weirdness” sets them apart enough to have these remediated reality experiences, and each character knows they are weird.
• When a remediated reality experience occurs, often times the other characters on the show embrace it as well, or at least pretend to go along with it.
• Also, these three characters often use their remediated reality experiences as a way to communicate with the other characters on the show.

As I’ve explored the three characters more in depth, I would also add that:

• Through the remediated reality experience, the character usually comes away with a new found realization about their own personality or identity.
• Each of these characters is a fan of something, which usually helps shape the remediated reality.

This last one is a point that I don’t think I’ve talked about very much and would like to explore because I think it’s this point that allows the audience to identify more with the characters and perhaps explain the reason why we want remediated realities for ourselves or represented to us. Moss is, of course, a fan of technology, which we can pick up from in his very first introduction to us (see the video in this post) when he talks about various machines and software with such enthusiasm. Abed is a fan of pop culture, specifically movies and television shows, and Codex is a fan of her video game. As we’ve already discussed, the characters’ remediated realities are shaped through these things. In many ways the things they are a fan of have informed their self identity and therefore informs their remediated reality.

It only makes sense that being a true fan of something would lead one to want to incorporate it more and more in one’s life.  Found in the book Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, which is a collection of essays, Roberta Pearson expresses in her essay “Bachies, Bardies, Trekkies, and Sherlockians”

Fans… incorporate the cultural texts as part of their self-identity, often going on to build social networks on the basis of shared fandoms (pg. 102).

In another essay in the book “Place, Elective Belonging and the Diffused Audience,” Longhurst et al. say that fandom indicates “aspects of everyday performance and imagination that are informing mundane practices. Thus, performance, imagination, and spectacle are embroiled in practices of attachment and identity in everyday life of media-drenched societies at many levels” (pg. 137). And lastly, in their essay “Playing the Game: Performance in Digital Game Audiences,” Crawford and Rutter express the same sentiment as the previous essays:

Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) suggest that the mass media increasingly impinges on and saturates contemporary society in a “mediascape” (Appaduari 1990) that, as with the landscape beneath our feet, often goes unnoticed but is fundamental in shaping the world around us. This mediascape provides a resource that individuals draw upon in their social performances. As a result, “being a member of an audience is no longer an exceptional event, nor an every day event [;] rather it is constitutive of everyday life” (Abercrobie & Longhurst 1998: 68-69). That is to say, we live in an increasingly narcissistic and “performative society” where individuals will draw on the media as a “resource” (such as informing the way they dress, speak, or act) in constructing their social performances (pg. 275-6). *Note all references in this quotation were in the quote and can be found in the book.

We’ve already discussed what all of these essays point out, that our society has become saturated with media, and it is because of this that the media has influenced our lives and formed our identities. But it’s not just the media in general, but the forms of media that we love and adore, that we use consistently, that we are fans of that help us bond with others and create our own sense of self. This goes back to what I said earlier that the characters use their remediated reality experience to communicate with those around them, and that often times the other characters go along with the experience. If the media can help create fans that then use the media to find each other and bond, it makes sense that the fans could take it a step further by creating a remediated reality to do the same thing: connect, bond, and communicate.

As we can see in the way we use media now (setting remediated realities aside for the moment), other than for entertainment purposes, the majority of mass media is used to communicate with other people around the globe, through phones, television, Internet, radio etc. It’s also used as a way for people to identify themselves and create bonds with others: we have social media network sites like Facebook that allow us to show what bonds we have and to explain to others who we are and what we like; we have various blog platforms that allow us to further express ourselves and even help us find others that have the same interests. There are even other media outlets that let us create and even collaborate with others to create something that we can then share with more people.

The first thing that came to my mind (since I am a part of it) that is an example of this is Tumblr. At first glance it seems like Tumblr is just another blogging platform, and in many ways it is, but once you’ve been on it and created your own Tumblr blog, after awhile you see it is much more than that. It is a very social community of users that create, collaborate, share, and bond. Speaking from personal experience, it is through Tumblr and my love for certain TV shows, movies, books, actors etc. that I have been able to find others that are fans of the same things I am. While I have my own blog that I use to demonstrate what things I enjoy (so creating my own identity), I have become friends with others who share my same thoughts and feelings (communicating through the media). And it is through these fandom related things that I have been able to create stronger bonds with these people whom I’ve never actually met in person but whom I’d consider to be my friends. Many create things on Tumblr related to their interests that others add on to or recreate as well. In many ways, we are doing the same things as Moss, Abed, and Codex, creating an experience that we share together that is highly mediated but that allows us to communicate, self identify, and bond with each other.

Basically what it comes down to is this:

We are fans of media. And as fans, we have incorporated the media into our lives more and more, making it become second nature to us. It informs our identities, and creates our social communities and bonds with others. Just as Codex works with the other members of her guild to create a remediated reality to take down Zaboo’s mom the “boss,” that afterwards not only makes Codex more confident in herself but helps the guild bond more and create a tighter friendship, we do the same with our media. We meet others through the media that we identify with and we create stronger bonds with each other and communicate with each other through the media as well.

It’s true that we might not be able to truly create the remediated realties we see on TV through these three characters and others (at least not yet anyway). I highly doubt that any time soon we’ll wake up one more and find ourselves stop motion animated, or suddenly shoot lightning bolts from our eyes, but it doesn’t make the remediated realities we see on TV any less significant to ourselves. We could, like Abed, set up a whole dinner to be like a movie. We could, like Moss, use an app to help us talk to others so we can fit in with them more. We could, like Codex, relate the things that happen in our lives to a video game. And many of us do. We still try to communicate with others through the media, and some of us might be “weird” and take a more extreme approach like our three characters, but the same principles hold true for us all: we use media to communicate with others, to create bonds with those others, and to set us apart and identify ourselves as a fan of a certain type of media.

Our realities in many ways are already remediated, and we’re okay with it and want more.

Examples of Our Own Remediated Reality

Throughout my posts I have been hinting (or okay, blatantly stating) that the remediated realities that these three television characters demonstrate are a representation of the remediated realities that we, the audience, either already do or perhaps desire to do. Which then of course begs the question, what are some examples of how we have our own remediated realities (or at least try to create our own), or express our want to have one (like how Codex wishes her life was measured in experience points).

Let’s take the easy one, desires to have a remediated reality, first. In many ways these desires are expressed in sentiments we share with one another about how we wish life was more like the movies, or how we want to have the ability to make our own life like our favorite TV show. In my research, I came across one author who throughout the book expressed her wish of living a more remediated reality:

I walk down the street, safely encapsulated in my media player’s sound bubble. A dog runs past, chased by its owners, causing chaos on the sidewalk. For a moment I wish I could pause, back up, rewind, replay the scene, as I would if it happened on my television or computer screen (Murphy 79).

I know that I’ve expressed this same sentiment. If only we could rewind our life, rewatch some experience in slow motion, so that we could appreciated it more, or change it or fix it. These are all desires for a remediated reality, one that comes out of the fact that “technologies such as television, computers, networks, and cell phones [have] become habitual parts of twenty-first-century living–shaping the ‘scale or pace or pattern’ of experience” (Murphy 23).

With that said, technology and media has shaped our experiences further by having us actually create more remediated realities for ourselves. One of the more obvious ways is through the gamification of our life, specifically with alternate reality games (ARGs). In her book Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal talks about how games are better and people turn to them more often because “reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy” (pg. 3). While this bold statement she makes can be argued against, she is trying to make the point that more people are moving toward a remediated reality and that in fact we should because it would be more productive and more people would be happy.

As examples of this, McGonigal discusses several areas where people have been making progress in the effort to make reality more fun and more like a video game:

1. Chore Wars- “an example of a life-management ARG–a software program or service that helps you manage your real life like a game” (pg. 142).

Chore Wars is an alternate reality game (ARG), a game you play in your real life (and not a virtual environment) in order to enjoy it more. Chore Wars is essentially a simplified version of World of Warcraft, with one notable exception: all of the online quests correspond with real-world cleaning tasks, and instead of playing with strangers or faraway friends online, you play the game with your roommates, family, or officemates (pg. 120).

2. Quest to Learn- “an example of an organizational ARG. It uses game design as a guiding philosophy for creating new institutions and inventing new organizational practices” (pg. 142).

Their ideal school is a game, from start to finish: every course, every activity, every assignment, every moment of instruction and assessment would be designed by borrowing key mechanics and participation strategies from the most engaging multiplayer games…. Quest to Learn is a public charter school in New York City for students in grades six through twelve. It’s the first game-based school in the world (pg. 128).

3. SuperBetter- “a concept ARG. It uses social media and networking tools to virally spread new game ideas, missions, and rule sets, which players can repurpose and adapt for their own lives as they see fit” (pg. 142).

SuperBetter is a superhero-themed game that turns getting better into multiplayer adventure. It’s designed to help anyone recovering from an injury or coping with a chronic condition get better sooner–with more fun, and with less pain and misery, along the way (pg. 135).

Along with these three ARGs that McGonigal goes on to explain more in depth, she also talks about how game and web developers are creating more apps, sites, and software that can help you make your reality more remediated. She even talks about how during one of her presentations she expressed the desire to get a plus-one public speaking point, and when she returned home, she had received an email from someone at the conference who had created a site, plus-one-me.com, that would allow her to do just that (pg. 147):

There was a perfect little web application dedicated to giving and tracking stats in an array of thirty-seven different personal strengths: creativity, generosity, speed, fashion, listening, and backbone, for example (pg. 147).

Well whadya know? Turns out Codex can measure her life in experience points after all!

There are of course many other ARGs that have been created that allow us to have a more remediated reality, but even our media in general can create a more remediated reality. We, like Abed, make references to culture and media all the time. While we might not end up playing ARGs or be capable of rewinding our life, it doesn’t make our desires to do so any less important. Sometimes we want to level up in our lives just like we would in our games and gain points and achievements for our real life, offline avatars, us.

Codex as the Closest Example to Her Audience

As I mentioned in my post on how television reflects the audience, I believe that of the three characters I’ve discussed here, Codex appears to be the one that is most like her audience, and therefore the most relatable. While she could be considered “nerdy” and “weird,” she still has an air of “normalcy” that we see through her webcam videos and her interactions with the other characters and her reactions to her situations. She still recognizes that some of the things she says are weird, like when she corrects herself about not being able to log off of your life or when she realizes how embarrassing it was for her to admit the game was all she had.

Abed does this occasionally, like at the end of the “Critical Film Studies” episode he admits to Jeff that he has to use pop culture references to relate to everyone. But, he still is odd enough that it might be hard for his audience to relate to him apart from his references and finding him humorous. Moss also realizes he’s weird and is probably at least a little more relatable than Abed in that he’s not as extreme in his weirdness, but again he along with Abed have a more limited audience that can relate to them.

I would like to add that despite Codex being the closest to her audience, all three characters still connect with the audience viewer, especially through their remediated reality experiences, just like they can connect with their fellow characters through them. We also connect with them through this experience because it not only allows us to understand their character more, but most times we recognize ourselves through the remediation either because we understand the reference, or because we have experienced or wanted to experience something similar ourselves.

But, outside of the isolated remediated realities these characters have, Codex continues to still engage and represent her audience throughout the show and not just in her remediated reality experience.  The reason for this difference between Codex and Moss and Abed is because their level of “weirdness” is different. As Joan Cusack’s character tells Julia Roberts’ character in Runaway Bride, “Quirky and weird are two very different things.” In my opinion Moss and Abed are weird, but Codex is quirky. So, she’s just odd enough that she can have these remediated reality experiences, but also “normal” enough to still recognize that she is odd and still allow herself to be a reflection of a wider audience than Moss or Abed can.

I believe that this might go back to the fact that most people who experience a remediated reality, or want to experience one, still consider it to be outside of the norm and might even be afraid to admit (just like Codex) that they’d rather have a life that is more like their media than the one they currently have.

Codex and Her Webcam Confessionals

As I discussed in the previous post, we get a lot of Codex’s character and her feelings on her life through her webcam confessions at the beginning of every episode. I took all of these webcam scenes for the first season and spliced them all together (minus the last one from the “Boss” episode):

It becomes clear through these webcam videos that Codex is trying to figure out for herself the separation from her online identity as part of the guild in the video game and her real life identity as an unemployed person. She continually refers to the other characters, especially Zaboo, as their avatars in the game (“there’s a gnome warlock in my living room sleeping on my couch”) because to her, that is who those people are and that is how she knows them. As her video game and real world collide and become more enmeshed for her as the series progresses, you can tell that she starts to embrace a remediated reality more and more, wishing that her life was more like the video game.

She even points out the reason why she always preferred playing the game as opposed to living her own life, adding that even though there was drama in the game, you could just log off but you can’t do that in your real life (at least not how she means it). In the last webcam video, she says that she can’t let Bladez (another character on the show) destroy the guild because the game is all she has in the world right now. She even adds that she can’t believe she said that, implying that she realizes how pathetic it sounds even to her. However, it is true that it is through the guild that she has been able to grow more confident and face challenges (like in the “Boss” episode).

Through her chats to her webcam we can better understand how Codex is feeling and how mediated her life has become as she is continually trying to come to terms with the fact that while she’d rather choose to be in the game, she has to find a balance between her real life and her video game life since they have become so enmeshed. I believe that this intertwining between her video game identity and her real life identity is what allows her to have a remediated reality experience at the end of the series.

Codex and The “Boss”

As the series has progressed, Codex decides to get her guild (the people she plays with in the video game) together in order to help her convince Zaboo to leave and that she doesn’t want to be his girlfriend. However, we learn that Zaboo has a rather controlling mom who refuses to let him grow up and comes to take him back home. In an effort to try to help Zaboo, Codex gets everyone in the guild to help him “defeat” his mom:

In this episode, Zaboo’s mom comes to take him home away from Codex despite Zaboo’s protests. Zaboo doesn’t feel like he can stand up to his mom even though he is an adult, so Codex decides to help him. In order to do so, Codex decides to give him courage along with everyone else in The Guild by creating a remediated reality for them that they can relate to: that of the video game. She compares the confrontation with Zaboo’s mom like a fight with a boss (the villain you have to fight at the end of a level to either win or get to the next level), which helps the other members of The Guild visualize what’s going to happen and how to handle it. When each member takes a turn “fighting” the mom, they make a comment like, “out of ammo,” “nice damage,” “heal him up,” or “my life is draining,” which are all video game references, adding to the remediated reality Codex has created. We, the audience, even see what everyone is visualizing in their remediated reality when the mom “attacks” and lightning bolts are coming out of her fingers.

It is through this remediated reality that Zaboo gains the courage to stand up to his mom, and even Codex admits later on her webcam that after the remediated reality experience she feels like she can accomplish anything, especially with the help of The Guild. Clearly the remediated reality not only helped Codex create a more confident identity, but it also helps her create stronger social bonds with the other people that shared that experience with her. It added more depth to their friendships since it went beyond the video game world and combined it with reality.

Through Codex’s webcam, she admits that she wishes life was measured in experience points. While these are not true examples of remediated reality, they are a demonstration of the prevalence of media, specifically the video game, is in her life, which affects how she wants her reality to be. The next post I’ll talk about how Codex’s webcam confessionals at the beginning of every episode reveal more and more about how she feels and how much she wishes her life was more like her video game.

Introducing Codex From “The Guild”

This is Codex:

Codex, played by Felicia Day, is the last character I’m focusing on that manifests remediated realities on her show. Now, I realize that unlike the other two shows I focused on, “The Guild” is not technically a television show but a web series. However, as Sheila Murphy points out in How Television Invented New Media when discussing Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, it was an “instance of televisual and online convergence of content, production, and form” (p. 74). “The Guild” follows a very similar structure of Dr. Horrible, in that every episode starts with the main character talking into his/her webcam, and then afterwards following them in their life (like a TV show would). So while “The Guild” has remained a show that is online and not broadcast on television, it still holds many of the same conventions as an episodic TV show, and therefore still fits under the things I discussed earlier about television shows and their characters.

With that said, let’s discuss Codex for a little bit. From the clip, which is the first episode of the series, Codex (which is obviously not her real name) is trying desperately to create a boundary between her real life and her gaming life (and failing). As I’m sure you can guess, Codex’s remediated realities are focused around video games. Even from this first clip, we know that Codex considers the life that she leads inside the video game is more fun and engaging than her real life, and her video game self is very real to her. She remarks to the therapist that she is “killing her, literally.” Of course it’s not literally in the sense of her real life because she’s perfectly fine, but of her video game character, which is obviously real enough to Codex to be worried about her dying.

Of course while Codex sort of tries to keep some kind of balance and separation between her online gaming self and her real life self, it completely gets thrown out the window when Zaboo, a person she plays with in the game, shows up at her apartment. Thereby making her online and real worlds combine, which only creates more remediated realities for Codex as we’ll later discover.

Abed and His “Real” Conversation

In this episode, it’s Abed’s birthday and his friends want to do something special for him, but he has other ideas:

Again, this episode centers around Abed and his tendency to created remediated realities for himself. The surprise that Jeff mentions at the end of the clip is that all of his friends have arranged a surprise Pulp Fiction themed birthday party, which is one of his favorite movies. It’s interesting that Jeff notes that things with Abed were weird because he wasn’t being weird, which worried Jeff more. This is because Abed’s norm is usually a mediated reality full of pop culture references, but when he acts “normal” like everyone else, this is a real concern for Jeff. Because Jeff is worried about him, he decides to go along with whatever Abed is doing, but in the same turn he tries to get Abed to tell him why he’s acting this way and to go back to normal (well Abed’s normal). While Jeff tries to also get Abed to come with him to go to the surprise party, Abed confesses that he is acting this way after a realization he had when he got to play an extra on Cougar Town, one of his favorite shows:

When Abed starts describing his experience on the set of Cougar Town, he remarks that he wondered, “if he’s a fan that watches Cougar Town, how could he be in Cougar Town?” He then decides that he has to become someone who’s never seen the show and he creates the character Chad. This of course is Abed creating another remediated reality for himself in order to cope with his surroundings. But by creating this remediated reality, he learns something else about himself as well–that the character he had created (Chad) had lived a greater life in the 1 minute that he was an extra than Abed himself had.

It is after this remediated reality that he decides that he needs to abandon his references (and thereby abandon his remediated reality ways) so that he can be better than the old Abed. And he feels like in order to do this he needs to have a real conversation and be a real person because before he was “like the wallet. On the surface a reference to cinematic drivel but on the inside empty.” Abed thinks that because he references movies and uses pop culture to communicate and create his life for him, he’s not really living his life or being a real person; however, it’s very interesting and almost ironic that he decides this after going through a remediated reality experience because it is clear that Abed needs them to have these epiphanies.

Once Abed gives Jeff his ultimatum (that he’s not allowed to leave until he’s had his first “real” conversation), Jeff gives in and starts to open up. But, Abed quickly realizes maybe he didn’t want this after all (focus on Abed’s reactions to Jeff’s story at the beginning of this clip), and then his cover is blown:

This is of course is another example of a remediated reality that Abed creates for himself. This time he sets everything up like the movie My Dinner with Andre. What’s ironic is that he does this whole set up because he wants to have a “real” conversation with Jeff. It starts to become clear that Abed is uncomfortable and that it’s not going how he planned because when Jeff starts to reveal things about himself, Abed’s reactions are ones of horror. He even slips back into his normal tone of voice when he says, “Yes,” after  Jeff asks him if he can tell him something he’s never told anyone else. But even though it is Jeff who opens up and has a “real” conversation, it’s still not a “real” conversation for Abed (at least defined by Jeff’s standards) because it has been set up like the movie. It is another remediated reality that Abed has made in order to help him cope and as we later find out to communicate with Jeff:

In the clip Abed apologizes to Jeff for trying to force him into his remediated reality experience and confesses to him why he did it in the first place. Abed admits that he had chose that particular movie because it was about two guys having dinner in a restaurant and one friend had been avoiding the other, which he saw as Jeff and himself. Abed says that he needs the pop culture references to relate to everyone because he can’t do it any other way. Like we’ve discussed in previous posts on Abed and Moss, it is through the remediated reality that the character can communicate with others or be able to relate to them, and this is especially true for Abed. He has to use and create these remediated realities because that is the only way he can understand himself and those around him.

A few fun facts about this episode:

• Abed, played by Danny Pudi, actually did appear as an extra on Cougar Town (which is a whole other topic entirely that we won’t get into). CLICK HERE to watch the clip.
• Richard Ayoade (Moss from the IT Crowd, the first remediated reality character we talked about) actually directed this episode of “Community” (titled “Critical Film Studies”).

Abed and His Animated Self

This whole episode of “Community” is in stop-motion animation (while most times this show is live action), which Abed recognizes immediately but appears to be the only one that notices. The other characters play along and pretend they are animated for the sake of Abed, and then later continue at the suggestion of the school therapist:

This is most obviously a remediated reality for Abed, and for him alone since he seems to be the only one that sees they are animated. Of course, as an outside viewer, we know that Abed is not crazy and he really is animated (hypermediacy at its best), which causes us to identify with him rather than the others who think that there must be something wrong with him. Abed decides that this remediated reality he is in is happening for a reason (to him the reason is because it must be an important Christmas and that he has to find the meaning to end the remediated reality), and while this is true, it isn’t the reason he thinks original (which will see in a later clip. And because Abed has such good friends who want to help him, they decide to go along with Abed’s “delusion,” which allows Abed to direct them further. Like when he tells them to move around more since they’re animated and to stick to the format (of a claymation Christmas film) and have a song, he himself even sings a song to fit the format that is just titled “Sad Quick Christmas song.”

Abed is allowed to direct them more in his remediated reality when the psychologist decides to put all of them under hypnosis so they can figure out the reason why Abed thinks they’re animated. This of course allows Abed to take a further step in his remediated reality by not only being animated, but creating the Christmas film he wanted and going on his Christmas journey to find the meaning of Christmas:

As you can see, Abed takes control of the story and gives them characters and even tries to get them to stay on point (“cut the non-thematic chatter”) because after all this is his remediated reality. But if there are characters that try to break it and tell him it isn’t real, they get “ejected” from it. The therapist ejects them because he wants Abed to stay in his hypnosis so he can get down to the bottom of Abed’s delusion. However, as the episode progresses, we realize Abed ejects people as well because he only wants people who will help him find the meaning of Christmas (so he can continue his remediated reality). And as the episode nears the end, we come down to the reason why Abed is experiencing this remediated reality:

This is one of the most significant things to note in this episode: Abed is using this remediated reality as the way that he makes his real-life connection and comes to terms with his “real” reality. Abed confesses that his mom and him used to watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (a stop-motion animated Christmas film) every year on December 9^th, and when another character points out that that’s what today is, we start to get a glimpse as to why Abed believes everyone is animated. Then it is revealed that he received a note from his mom, telling him she wasn’t coming, and it is this note that results in the remediated reality for Abed. When the Christmas wizard (the psychologist) points this out to Abed to try to get him to face his reality (even remarking that it’s him against reality and “reality always wins”), his friends help him continue his journey so he can find out for himself why he has this remediated reality.

When the therapist reveals to everyone why Abed thinks everyone is stop-motion animated, all of Abed’s friends disagree and want to “fight” him. Duncan (the therapist) says that they are only enabling the delusion, to which several reply: “The delusion you are trying to cure is called Christmas. It’s the crazy notion that the longest, coldest, darkest nights can be the warmest and brightest. Yeah, and when we all agree to support each other in that insanity it becomes true” (emphasis mine). This last sentence is stated by the one that was worried about Abed’s remediated reality the most throughout the episode. With her statement though, she illustrates both sides of discussing remediated reality. Most people would think that this is a crazy notion, but if enough people agree or demonstrate it, it is true. Because Abed’s friends were willing to help him and pretend to go along with his remediated reality, he was able to communicate with them through and even find a meaning for himself:

And even after Abed makes his realization, he tells them they can end the remediated reality, but they all decide to keep it going because it “feels so right.” This again goes back to the discussion that if enough people agree to the remediated reality it becomes true and real for them all, which we see again in the rather humorous clip at the very end of the episode with Troy and Abed (where it is Troy’s remediated reality and Abed goes a long with it).

To summarize, Abed creates this remediated reality of being animated as a coping mechanism to deal with his real problems, and as a way to discover more about his own identity. Lucky for Abed, he has rather supportive friends who agree to go along with his remediated reality in order to help him. As we’ll discover in the next post, Abed also uses his remediated realities to not only cope with his own emotions but as a way to communicate with the other characters on the show.

 

Introducing Abed From “Community”

This is Abed:

If you can’t already tell, Abed, played by Danny Pudi is clearly “not normal,” and just like Moss doesn’t quite understand or pick up on certain social cues either. However, Abed’s remediated reality experiences are usually movie, TV, or pop culture related, as you can tell from this clip when he relates all of the people in the study group to the characters of The Breakfast Club.

Of the three characters I’m focusing on, it’s Abed that has the most remediated reality experiences, or at least mentions them the most. He constantly connects situations that are happening with the study group to other TV shows, or movies, and even sometimes his predictions of how things will result because that’s how they are in a movie, actually do end up that way.

As we’ll see in the next few posts on him, Abed often uses his remediated reality as a way to express how he’s truly feeling because that’s the only way he can communicate or connect with the other characters on the show. In the case of Moss, he used his remediated reality to connect with other people he didn’t know, but Abed uses it as one of his normal means of communication. However, like Moss, Abed’s friends usually go along with his remediated reality to help Abed and to understand him.

Moss and Friendface

In this episode, Jen tries to convince both Moss and Roy to sign up for Friendface (a parody of Facebook). While hesitant at first, they both join, which leads to all three of them having a remediated reality together, opting to communicate via a chat window on the site even though they are all sitting in the same room with one another. Even though the site allows them to connect with others, they realize this isn’t always a good thing:

At the beginning of the clip, Jen remarks that Friendface is great because “you can talk to friends and flirt with people,” to which Moss responds that he has better things to do than that. This is humorous in two ways, the first is that Jen’s remark implies that it is through Friendface you can interact with people, although we know you can do the same thing in person, which is why Moss’s comment is funny in the second because we know he means it in both senses. Jen is implying that the remediated relationships on Friendface are better and what make it great, while Moss doesn’t care for either (but we of course find out later that Friendface brings people together but it’s not a good thing).

All three characters experience a remediated reality together as they become so addicted to Friendface that decide to communicate with each other via a chat window on the site even though all three of them are sitting in a room together mere feet away from one another. The conversation becomes one that is both online and offline as they type some of their responses to one another in the chat and then say some of their responses out loud to one another. Even adding that Jen feels so “social” when they’re all just sitting in silence typing on their respective computers. This further illustrates how much media has influenced our lives and that we too do similar things that create a remediated reality.

In this next clip, however, the gang quickly finds out that being so so connected to others through Friendface isn’t always good. And this remediated reality that is created through Friendface forces Moss to pretend to be someone he’s not (yet again) for Jen’s sake:

At the beginning of the clip, Moss decides he doesn’t like Friendface because he says it has opened up another line of communication with his mom. It’s also important to note that while not included in the clip, Roy also doesn’t like the connection because an old girlfriend whom he didn’t like found him and he has to meet up with her. At the end of the scene, Jen remarks she’s going to meet an old classmate she had found on Friendface, but then she ends up lying about what’s she’s been up to in an attempt to impress her.

Because of Friendface and the remediated reality it has created, it actually forces all three characters to become people they aren’t (which we’ll see in the clip below). But, especially Moss, who is forced to pretend he is Jen’s husband so she can keep up the charade for her schoolmates with the remediated reality she has created for herself. As you can tell from the clip, when Moss (who it should be noted has changed his voice for the role, just as he did when talking about football) is pretending to be Jen’s husband, he doesn’t quite seem to know when to stop pretending, even after Jen is trying to give him hints that he can stop.

In fact, Moss continues to play the role of the husband even when Roy shows up wanting Jen to pretend to be his girlfriend, and it escalates to a point where all three just cut and run:

While Moss doesn’t display an overtly remediated reality during this whole experience, it is clear that as a result of the media he must create a different reality than his own. But, it brings up the same issue I raised in the previous case study, when should Moss stop? He decides to keep creating this façade that despite Jen’s hints to stop become so creative that it results in him having to make a break for it. This illustrates the point that while sometimes Moss does know when to stop his remediated reality (like in the previous case study), sometimes he does not.

It is also interesting to note that in this episode, it is Jen that most displays the mediated world that we live in. However, Moss is still forced to have a remediated reality in order to help Jen out of a bind. The negatives of the mediated society and remediated reality that most of us live in are brought out a great deal in this episode.