Multimedia Essay Research Paper Nic SinghDecember 96

Multimedia Essay, Research Paper

Nic Singh

December .96

A Discussion on

Multimedia

Multimedia, or mixed-media, systems offer presentations that integrate

effects existing in a variety of formats, including text, graphics,

animation, audio, and video. Such presentations first became commercially

available in very primitive form in the early 1980s, as a result of advances

that have been made in digital compression technology– particularly the

difficult area of image compression. Multimedia online services are

obtainable through telephone/computer or television links, multimedia

hardware and software exist for personal computers, networks, the internet,

interactive kiosks and multimedia presentations are available on CD-ROMs and

various other mediums. The use of multimedia in our society has it benefits

and it.s drawbacks, most defiantly. Some of the more computer-related uses of

multimedia, such as electronic publishing, the internet, and computers in

education will be discussed in depth thought this paper.

Electronic publishing is the publishing of material in a computer-accessible

medium, such as on a CD-ROM or on the Internet. In a broader sense of the

term it could also include paper products published with the aid of a desktop

publishing program, or any form of printing that involves the use of a

computer.

Reference works became available in the mid-1980s both in CD-ROM format and

online. Increasingly, in the 1990s, magazines, journals, books, and

newspapers have become available in an electronic format, and some are

appearing in that format only. Companies that publish technical manuals to

accompany their other products have also been turning to electronic

publishing.

Electronic books have been recently introduced to the world as a whole. This

new concept is the use of internet or otherwise computer technology to

electronically convert books to a digital, readable format viewed on a

television set or computer screen. This would most likely be done by scanning

in individual pages in a book, arrange them in orderly fashion, and have

users be able to cycle back and forth between the photo-identical pages. This

method would be very quick, and very easy to accomplish- that is- scanning

pages as opposed to re-typing millions of words is preferred. This brings us

to another method in electronic book production- the interactive method. In

digital format, the book.s pages can only be viewed, just like a book. If a

reader would want to take notes from a book, he/she would have to write down

the notes by hand, or would be forced to photo-copy the page(s). If the book

was typed out entirely as would be done by an electronic word processor such

as Microsoft Word, users would greatly benefit. The ability for the computer

to recognize the words on the screen as actual words as opposed to mere

bitmaps is often unrealized to the computer non-familiar. This recognition

allows the page to be edited with complete interactivity and ease- again like

Microsoft Word. Books can be updated or corrected in real time, without

having to re-upload corrected pages, or compensate for unalignment in words

and page breaks. Perhaps the most beneficial to the user is the

interactivity- the ability to interact with the words in the book. By

highlighting letters on the page, copying them, and pasting them in personal

clipboards or other word processing programs, the tedious task of note-taking

can be eliminated. This idea, on the other hand, can raise issues with the

author and publisher of the book. Plagiarism, already a problem, would run

wild in this area. Users would theoretically be able to copy entire books or

magazines to their personal files, and be able to use them as their own

reports or writings. Additionally, the ability to view a book and it.s

contents at no charge obviously will not agree with some publishers. This

also brings up the idea of charging people for time .online.. Users could be

charged money for use of electronic books/magazines on a time basis. This,

however, will not go over well in the public domain. We would rather take on

the trouble of taking manual notes than be charged for something that is

otherwise free at a library.

In a very short time the Internet has become a major vehicle of worldwide

communication and an unrivaled source of information. One of the Internet’s

fascinations is that its resources are limited only by the number of

computers participating in the World Wide Web and the imaginations of their

users.

The Internet is an international web of interconnected government,

education, and business computer networks- in essence, a network of networks.

From a thousand or so networks in the mid-1980s, the Internet had grown to

about 30,000 connected networks in mid-1994. By mid-1995 the number

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