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