Multimedia versus Singular media

Essay by evanslim November 2004

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The combined use of media, such as movies, music, lighting, CD-ROMs, and the Internet creates and opens up a whole new and exciting world of media experience for users. Comparing multimedia to singular media such as use of just a book, television or even the internet alone is not as exciting and interactive as multimedia. In this essay, I will be touching on several aspect of comparison between multimedia and singular media and the advantages and disadvantages of them. Ironically, books are the main research material for the essay despite the nature of this essay and furthermore, I conclude that the means of multimedia, in most cases, way surpass books as a media.

Initially, the idea that I had about this essay was to just do a basic and general comparison between the use of multimedia and singular media. But as I read more about the topic, I've decided to be more specific by comparing multimedia such as an interactive CD-ROM that incorporate sounds and images that are visually stimulating with interaction to that of a book, television or the cinema.

Like I mentioned earlier, the ironic thing about the research of this essay was that it was primarily done on books. Research was also carried out on-line and I have even used ideas that were based on past experiences on multimedia to prove certain points of it.

From the interview with Slavoj Zizek in Digital Delirium, it was mentioned that the comparison between multimedia and singular media go back even before 1989.

"Zizek: the British Film Institute proposed to me to choose my own six, seven films and to do a couple of lectures there, since I use so many film examples. They came up with the idea to do a CD-ROM, because I write in the same manner:...