Mutato commentary by Jon Roig
Arizona Daily Wildcat
The other day I was wandering
around the ASUA bookstore, and I stumbled upon Spin magazine's "Encyclopedia of Alternative Rock." As I started to thumb through it, my initial curiosity turned to horror as I realized there was something terribly, terribly wrong with it.
The facts were there, all right Ÿ although I didn't subject the "A to Z" tome to any close scrutiny. Something was missing. There was no sense of perspective, no sense of history. I can imagine the book as a good reference work for a rock critic to check obscure facts against his memory, but if I wanted to learn about rock music, would I start reading at "A" and know everything by the time I reached "Z"?
I doubt it. History does not follow a straight, narrative path Ÿ it is a web of connected events and incidents. Ideas intersect at the strangest of places sometimes, and that can't be captured fully in any book.
Imagine a book that attempted to historically chronicle the events that led to the creation of, say, Hootie and the Blowfish's unique sound from the beginning of rock as we know it. Not only would it be horribly confusing (with about a billion appendices), but it would be limited only to the stated goal of "understanding Hootie" Ÿ not much of a book on musical history.
I encountered a similar situation when I watched the part of PBS's "History of Rock 'n' Roll" series on punk rock a few weeks ago. While it provided some interesting insight into the origins of the punk rock movement, it seemed like a book written with moving pictures.
Now, imagine if you will, a "History of Punk" CD-ROM. It sounds like a bit of an abomination, but done right it could be like reliving the so-called "golden age of punk."
Just like life, you could concentrate on the things that interest you and filter out the rest. You could become a world traveler, jumping from New York to London with a click of the mouse to see how those scenes influenced each other musically and ideologically. You could watch concert footage, listen to representative recordings Ÿ even examine 'zines Ÿ in a manner free from the time constraints of television or the space constraints of printed text.
In a way, you'd be the ultimate scenester Ÿ free from time and location and free to observe as much, or as little, as you'd like. You could see how genres melded together and bands influenced each other, and learn from the custom lesson that you prepare for yourself.
Compare this to the "Encyclopedia of Alternative Rock." The Spin project is chock full o' facts, yet dreadfully short of ideas. Something more is needed to put ideas into perspective.
That's where teachers come in, the current model for a killer multimedia application. With extremely high bandwidths enabling the transmission of vast amounts of sound and video at will, there's nothing like them in the computer world . yet. Teachers provide the structure to enhance comprehension and put the facts in a textbook into context. They show movies, project images . some even provide their own specialized text resources so you can form conclusions from primary sources instead of relying on the conclusions presented by textbooks.
Computers won't replace teachers anytime soon. Teachers can (usually) comprehend questions and elaborate on points that aren't clearly understood. They have specialized knowledge that allows them to string together ideas that may, at first, seem unrelated if far apart in a textbook.
It's not really all that different from a multimedia project. Computers can process video, sound, text, and images with relative ease now. All you need to do is find the right way to put them all together to make them interesting. The tools are all out there and already in use for certain specialized teachings tasks, such as corporate job training. Anyone, with a little training, can author a multimedia application. In fact, CCIT has a state-of-the-art multimedia lab at your disposal. Anyone can go there and use it, assuming that your use doesn't conflict with the classes that meet there. Tucson Community Cable Corporation offers free classes on multimedia production.
The moral of all this? You can't effectively navigate history with a book or a TV show, but the possibilities of multimedia serving as a teacher are still unexplored. It can bring experiences to life in new ways and shed light on things a textbook might miss or deem too unimportant to interrupt the flow of the text. And, the ability to link together facts in a non-narrative way, free of chronological constraints, is what makes multimedia on a computer a superior medium to either television or text. So, what's stopping you?