Same Team: Text and Media

 My friend Tom started a blog almost a month ago, but this blog is no ordinary blog.  Tom's blog is a blog comprised of annotated voice recordings, of his wife's sleep-induced anecdotes.  His wife apparently talks a lot in her sleep, so Tom uses a voice-activated recorder app for his iPod.  This is different from any other blog that I have seen before, and when Dr. Burton was speaking about how text is being teamed up more often than ever before with other media forms, I recalled Tom's blog and its entertaining format.  Blogs are usually text supported by other media forms, but Tom's blog is made up of recordings and photos supported by small amounts of text.  The text and other media work together to create a more engaging and informative experience for the reader.  Just like in football, you do not tackle your own teammate, which would hurt your end goal.  Instead of trying to separate text and media, having them work together will help you efficiently tackle the issue you are trying to address.

 

In my English class, we were discussing this idea when talking about the Digital Public Library of America.  The plan appears to focus on text alone.  To keep up with the changing world of information and technology, I feel they need to embrace the media to supplement the information found in text form.  The opportunity to combine these informative mediums is available to those creating the Digital Pubic Library of America.  It will require more time and effort, because there is more involved in the process of creating a digital book when you include other forms of information.  One example of combining these mediums is seen in Al Gore's book, Our Choice. 

"The Our Choice app is a digital reading experience that matches a book for ease and outdoes it in ways that Gutenberg surely never imagined. With just your fingers, and the screen, the 400-page book becomes a portal to video, photo, and infographic content that demonstrates just how powerful an aid technology can be to the cause of knowledge." -Amy Lee from The Huffington Post

The Digital Public Library of America is a great opportunity to start a new library form including a rather new, more informative, and engaging book format, allowing text and other media forms to play for the same team.