Extra Credit

The reading from praxis for this section was fairly simple. The authors simply outlined how technology has affected the medium in which consumers prefer to consume news, information, stories, and other rhetoric. Multimedia is a fairly useful tool and more often than not, expected in modern reading culture. I myself consume a majority of my news and media from a mobile device. As a college student, I rarely if ever find that I have the time to really sit down and enjoy anything so reading newspapers, watching the evening news, or waiting for releases of transcripts is not part of my daily routine. I must consume my news in a way that is digestible whilst doing other things. This often entails shorter pieces released by outlets like Buzzfeed, or skimming the titles of Washington Post headlines that pop-up on my desktop. If I find that I have a few minutes or the work I am doing is not entirely consuming, I enjoy watching nightly programs that deliver news with a more humorous tone. Like mentioned in the Praxis readings I find I am part of the millennial group that turns to "...comedy shows like The Daily Show and other alternative media instead of traditional news outlets." Especially with the ever tumultuous political climate of today, I find it easier to digest news that is not delivered in serious tones that truly make me feel the weight of what is happening around me, often if not always, beyond my control. The benefits of multimedia presentation is not a new idea or unique to modern technology by any means, however. Hand drawn political cartoons in newspapers, pictured findings for scientific experiments, illustrated novels, all of these are examples of multimedia projects that happened before the newest technological revolution. In all these the aim is the same, make some point or another clearer to the intended audience without the use of many long paragraphs and complex sentences.

Multimedia is not the only way to present an idea. The presentation of the material itself is also quite important. Much like how consumers find news more enjoyable if presented in the form of a joke, font and typography can help to convey a point as more or less trustworthy and make a piece easier or more difficult to read and remember. I found that the videos, VSauce's "A Defense of Comic Sans" and Vox's "How Stranger Things Got its Retro Title Sequence" both made this point very effectively (through the use of a multimedia presentation). The point made in VSauce's video, if not somewhat muddled by the history of Comic Sans, is that typography can be used both appropriately and inappropriately to convey messages. Very rarely would one ever stumble across an academic paper written in Comic Sans, and this is because, consciously or unconsciously, we have been conditioned to believe that the more formal the font (something like Times New Roman or Helvetica) the more reliable the information and vice versa.