Hypermedia

Hypermedia has definitely changed the world, and I feel that it’s a change for the better. Hypermedia is generally defined as “a logical extension of the term hypertext in which graphics, audio, video, plain text and hyperlinks intertwine to create a generally non-linear medium of information”. The World Wide Web is probably the best example of hypermedia. The web brings all types of mediums together to give the user a plethora of information. Paul Otlet, the father of information science, wrote several essays on how to collect and organize the world's knowledge. His vision was to house all the world’s knowledge in one general spot and a person would be able to search through this data in an easy way and get all the information they needed and in any form they wanted (visual, text, audio, etc). His model for this plan is very similar to how the internet works.

Hypermedia has definitely changed the world and I feel it’s a change for the better. An information system like the internet has brought information and knowledge into the hands of so many people. Before the internet became such a commonplace thing, the best way to get information was probably going to the library to search for knowledge. While I loved the library growing up, I must admit that hypermedia has made my life so much easier. Doing a book report when I was in grade school involved going to the library, trying to find a couple of books that contained pertinent information, going home and browsing these books and extracting the necessary information for the report. There are several problems with this method: a) books weren’t always checked-in b) sometimes it was hard to know what to search for a book under c) lots of time was spent d) library hours. Nowadays, one is able to go to their preferred search engine and try their luck searching thousands of documents in a span of mere seconds. Hypermedia also gives you a variety of medias, which is very useful because everyone learns differently.

One way hypermedia has changed design is that with knowledge so readily available, untrained people are able to become “designers”. This can be viewed as a good thing or a bad thing. For example, I was really never formally trained as a web designer; I had a basic web 101 class, but that was it. But with access to hypermedia like the internet, I was able to search for specific knowledge that allowed me to teach myself web design. Hypermedia gave me access to videos, text, pictures and audio which really aided in my self-teaching. Buying books and reading through them did not help at all. If it weren’t for hypermedia, I’d still be a graphic designer instead of running the web department at work. There is also a down side to this access of knowledge. Anyone can get on the web and create a wordpress blog or something similar. They can teach themselves some simple css to customize their blog. Then they consider themselves a web designer because they were able tweak a blog template. With so many self-declared designers out there due to the easy access of hypermedia, it has definitely changed the field design and perception of those actually in the industry.

(image taken from http://9gag.com/gag/37798/)