Download e-book for iPad: On a Silver Platter: CD-ROMs and the Promises of a New by Greg M. Smith

By Greg M. Smith

ISBN-10: 0814786731

ISBN-13: 9780814786734

While the hot medium of CD-ROMs emerged, figures and critics alike proclaimed their almost limitless capability. Adapting fabric from well-established media like tv and movie, CD-ROMs have quick remodeled genres similar to technology fiction and horror. even as, the realities of exact CD-ROMs usually fall in need of their utopian visions.

On a Silver Platter marks a "coming of age" for CD-ROMs as a commercially and aesthetically major medium difficult serious cognizance. Greg Smith brings jointly media students similar to Lisa Cartwright, Henry Jenkins, Janet Murray, and Scott Bukatman to investigate how CD-ROMs provide choices to commonly used places--to museums, to towns, and particularly to study rooms. interpreting particular CD-ROM titles, together with, Sim urban, Civilization, and Phantasmagoria, the participants argue that CD-ROMs are complicated texts priceless of shut attention, either for a way they've got replaced our knowing of house and style, and for a way they are going to influence the advance of destiny media.

By analyzing specific CD-ROM texts and contexts, On a Silver Platter probes this new medium for perception and figuring out into the present kingdom of multimedia and into the way forward for expertise.

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Extra info for On a Silver Platter: CD-ROMs and the Promises of a New Technology

Sample text

By this definition the ‘‘interactive’’ books that allowed us to choose one narrative path over another are selective and not interactive. Interactivity gives the impression that we have many possible options at any given time. Of course a CD-ROM cannot present a truly infinite array of options, but it does not have to. To feel interactive, in Lippman’s sense, a CD-ROM must only convince us that there seem to be infinite possibilities for the player’s actions. I do not wish to continue Lippman’s labeling of certain programs as selective and others as interactive.

Some longer jumps include clips of the intervening space, insuring player orientation. The effect is a navigable, photorealistic, continuous space. The ambient sound shifts with each change of room. The detailed environment and easy mobility offer a strong sense of the Enterprise as a realized ship that persists when no one is watching the series. The naming of the CD-ROM a ‘‘technical manual’’ and the inclusion of the Riker narrated tour point to a confusion of metaphors. A technical manual tells about an object in an abstracted sense, focusing on its design specifications and performance parameters; a tour is a visit to the object, which brings with it the expectation that we are going to see it in use in a specific context.

We need to recognize the way commercial forces shape our current understanding of interactivity so that we are not trapped into a single way of conceptualizing interactivity. What today’s commercial CD-ROMs do offer instead is the ability to interact with narration concerning the sequence of events. If we are required to visit all the sites on a CD-ROM, at least we are able to visit them in an order of our own choosing. This differentiates multimedia products from film and television texts, which clearly specify the order in which we see and hear things.

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On a Silver Platter: CD-ROMs and the Promises of a New Technology by Greg M. Smith


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