Multimedia
Multimedia
- Orality
- Literacy
- “Electronicity”
Notes:
Language can live equally well on the manuscript, printed, or electronic page, not to mention on the stage, the radio and television airwaves, and--where it first comes to life-- in dialogue among human beings. Multimedia have the uncanny ability to imitate any and all of these channels. Each, however, has its own “rules,” and, in the transformation magically engendered by multimedia, other “rules” prevail, some of which are obvious, others of which we are only beginning to discover. When multimedia imitate orality, speech may appear independently, in connection with text, graphics, or video. The technology that permits easily comprehensible speech recognition is still around the corner, but some major advances have been made, so much so that short phrases have found their way into navigating telephone services. The constraint of time limiting speech, by its very nature, will have to be taken into account in useful applications.