Education, Culture, and Remediation

I have several thoughts I would like to jot down.
First, I am interested in how remediation applies to education. Many textbooks are now accompanied by CDs or DVDs. Many have websites. It is not uncommon to find textbooks completely on-line. Pictures in books and on overheads, class projects of dioramas and collages, movies watched in class, video projects—hypermediacy is and has been everywhere in education to some degree for some time. Students also sometimes watch the news on TV in class, a form of immediacy, directly connecting them to the world about which they are learning. In all these ways, we see that remediation has direct application to more than just entertainment.
At first I tended to see remediation as the direct result of an impatient, hurried, multi-tasking, low attention span society. Yes, there is intelligence behind the creation of the necessary technology, but the application seems largely shallow. But thinking about it in terms of education, I can appreciate its importance. As we are discovering more and more about how kids learn and about how there are different learning styles, we must find appropriate teaching styles. Hypermediacy provides these various stimuli.
Second, I would like to comment on the cultural implications of remediation. As I mentioned above, remediation is, at least to some degree, driven by a society that is largely entertainment-based. Because of this, many third-world countries cannot participate as actively in this “global” revolution; they have many more pressing needs, such as providing food, housing, and healthcare to their people.
Furthermore, I think it is important to acknowledge not only historical Western European instances of remediation, but also those of other cultures, such as the Aztecs, the Chinese, the Indians, and the Persians. I cannot say that I am extremely aware of their individual contributions to the development of remediation, but I feel that it is definitely something into which one could look.
A final point on culture is that Buddhist cultures, who are very in tune with nature, seem to have a much more natural sense of immediacy and hypermediacy. In meditating, in understanding nature, one’s senses are their own medium, and experience is immediate. It is virtual reality, but actual. I suppose this undermines the whole concept of media studies, but if you get back to basics, the bodily capacities for perception and cognition are mediated through sense organs to give practically immediate awareness of situations. Our bodies are the media through which we experience the world, and I cannot help wondering that if our society was more nature/fulfillment-based, instead of technology/entertainment-based, perhaps media studies would be more about coming to terms with the physicality of the world in which we live and of which we are a part.
In conclusion, different forms of remediation reveal how the human mind works—both on the level of child mental development and in the context of various cultures.