Written, audiovisual, and other forms of communications will be able to merge in the upcoming online world.

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The Internet offers the potential of interweaving various communications media to produce new forms that are compellingly different from anything we have seen to date.

At present, despite a lot of inflated talk about multi-media, all we’re really seeing much of is relatively simple combinations of media, like photographs illustrating text in magazine articles, or subtitles providing a bit of textual overlay to movies. 

But if material is presented in the kind of modular exposition format described and demonstrated throughout this essay, why couldn’t a single work encompass a section of text, then a section of short video, and so forth? 

Then again, why would the two media have to be restricted to separate sections?  Why couldn’t they occur together right in the same modular chunk of material?  There might be text on one side of the screen and some form of short video material looping on the other side.  The combination of text and video could be far more rich, clear, and compelling than either medium by itself.  Then when the user clicked the “continue” button for the text, another video item appropriate to the new text would also appear. 

For that matter, why would text and video have to appear in separate sections of the screen?  Sometimes it might be more effective to have the text overlaying and perhaps crawling over the video;  sometimes the video might “grow” from a section of text.  The possibilities are limitless.

They expand still further when we consider the options of interweaving in still photographs, artwork, music, spoken words, and other types of audio--in fact, virtually any other form of content that can be digitized.

© COPYRIGHT 2003 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.