New technologies breed new ways of storing and retrieving information. Some, such as card-index systems, museums and zoos, use physical structures. Others, constrained by the specific limitations of their medium, developed more immaterial methodologies. Film, for example, can only be accessed in a linear manner, through time, but the content uses a number of rhetorical mechanisms including metaphor, metonymy, chiasmus, displacement, symmetry and allegory to encode and communicate information in a memorable way. (Ironically the digitisation and frame by frame metatagging of much cinematic material may see film stored and accessed in new and hitherto almost impossible ways -- by order of the tones of backgrounds sequenced by spectrum, for example).

Each new technology, however, calls first upon its predecessors to provide it with organisational methodology in much the same way that Marshall Mcluhen suggests that the content of nay new media is always a prior medium -- the content of writing is speech, the written word is the content of print etc. David Jay Bolter and ? suggest that not only does new media recapitulate the methodologies of its precursors, but the its precursors themselves mirror and absorb the new expressive and aesthetic possibilities of their successors. MTV-style editing for example, made possible by video technologies and encouraged by TV advertisement aesthetics has been reabsorbed into cinema where Hollywood films typically have edit lengths in the fractions of a second. The 'multiple windows' screen aesthetic of electronic computers is increasingly being mimicked by television with even conventional narratives such as Ally McBeal using multiple simultaneous windows.

This process they call remediation.