Module 15. Hypertext, digital images, and society

In Unit 4, we looked at various ways in which digital multimedia influence people on an individual basis. In this module, we will examine a few topics related to the relationship between digital multimedia and society. As mentioned in Modules 2 and 3, you will be studying this relationship more intensively in your other courses. Because this course cannot fully cover the depth and breadth of this relationship, we will look at only a few cases to get you interested in studying these issues more.

In the Middle Ages, most people could neither read nor write, so information was mostly transmitted orally. Priests speaking from the local church pulpit and troubadours (traveling bards) brought news from outside the community. The ability to read and write were mostly in the hands of monks. The plague killed large numbers of people, resulting in numerous claims regarding land and property, which then needed to be documented. Many people became rich, leading to the expansion of urban centers and increased trade, which also needed some form of documentation.

The invention of the printing press transformed all of society by transforming the way that knowledge was organized. For instance, the printing press standardized the layout of printed material, which resulted in the invention of the index and the table of contents. Hypertext and hypermedia are the result of the evolution of precisely these technologies.

Summary

We have looked at a small number of examples on how digital media has influenced, is influencing, and might in the future influence how society works and how individuals interact with each other. These examples were presented as a series of more or less independent cases. In the next module, we will examine two theories of media that can help us describe what unifies of all these examples.