On the opening page of Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan remarked that "the 'content' of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph" (23-24). As his problematic examples suggest, McLuhan was not thinking of simple repurposing, but perhaps of a more complex kind of borrowing in which one medium is itself incorporated or represented in another medium. Dutch painters incorporated maps, globes, inscriptions, letters, and mirrors in their works. In fact, all of our examples of hypermediacy are characterized by this kind of borrowing, as is also ancient and modern ekphrasis, the literary description of works of visual art, which W.J.T. Mitchell (1994) defines as "the verbal representation of visual representation" (151-152). Again, we call the representation of one medium in another remediation, and we will argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media. What might seem at first to be an esoteric practice is so widespread that we can identify a spectrum of different ways in which digital media remediate their predecessors, a spectrum depending on the degree of perceived competition or rivalry between the new media and old.