There are many examples of words that are ruined long before they actually become useful to describe something.

Today, let’s talk about “Multimedia”!!!!! 📽️✍️🎙️🌈….. 👇

The word “multimedia” calls to mind a CD-ROM, the kind that you had to mount inside of a little beige plastic caddy before inserting it into your Macintosh Quadra.

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At that time multimedia generally meant “words AAAAAND pictures and maybe SOUUUUUNDS all on ONE THING.”

Later on “multimedia” became a catch-all word for anything that someone might make (like the awful word “content” is used today).

Some tools (and words are just tools) need to sit around in a drawer for a few decades before we find a good use for them…

As the world becomes more conscious of accessibility and the fact that different people learn in different ways at different times, the word “multimedia” finally has a good use: Much of what we make is published across multiple media. Prose/Film/Radio is the most common combo.

A note on multimedia work: Translation between media shouldn’t be automatic. Some thought should go into how something is best presented in each medium, even if sometimes it’s as simple as a text-to-voice, voice-to-text, or just saving out an audio version of a video.

Many works are single-media-only and they must be. There’s no clear film version of most radio stories just as there’s no prose version of a great film.

This is multimedia.

But there can always be a radio version of prose or poetry. 98% of YouTube videos could just be audio.

But because the word is ruined, we’ll need to use a word like multiformat, which I don’t hate, but—

It shoulda been you, multimedia… It shoulda been you.

My next experiment on my little blog is to begin making these posts multiformat.