Multimedia Literacy

Multimedia Literacy

A Guidebook for Strategic Presentation in the Rich-media Communications Era

By Robert L. Lindstrom
http://presentersuniversity.com/visuals_being_visual03.php

I recently sat through a senior project presentation by five business majors at a small, prestigious university in Southern California. As I watched the students take their turns on the stage and click through their PowerPoint slides, I was appalled, though not surprised, to discover that the five graduating seniors were functionally illiterate.

Of course, they were not illiterate in the traditional sense of being unable to read and write. There was nothing wrong with their verbal skills. There were no misspellings on the slides or in the paper report. The students were suffering from a different form of illiteracy--multimedia illiteracy.

Even though the project was a coordinated effort, the five students used different, and sometimes clashing, backgrounds and typefaces for each series of slides. In some cases, entire sentences filled the screen in large, bold type. Other times the slides presented only single-word bullet points that were obviously part of the original text outline and seemed to serve mostly as guiding notes for the presenters, not the audience. It was like watching Dr. Frankenstein slap together a monster out of spare parts.

There were a couple of pie charts, that clearly would have communicated the data better as a bar graphs, and some flow diagrams that were so full of tiny type and confusing shapes and arrows that even the people who provided the original data could not decode them. The students described data that should have been visualized and visualized data that should have been described. While the purpose of the presentation was to help the audience picture the highly visual business model that was the subject of their research, the students did not use a single photograph, original illustration or video.

I could go on beating up on these decent kids and their lousy presentation, but by now you get the point. Those five students, all of whom have landed good, entry-level jobs, are headed into the business world without even the most basic multimedia presentation skills. They did the work and passed their class, but at the crucial moment of communication, they failed. What is worse, they probably don't know they failed because their senior advisor, a retired businessman who returned to teaching some years ago, also suffers from multimedia illiteracy.

So, what's the big deal? What difference does it make if a few business grads are lame PowerPoint users?

Multimedia illiteracy is an epidemic in business today.

The reason for concern is twofold. First, the students are the rule, not the exception. Multimedia illiteracy is an epidemic in business today. Second, it has been clear for decades now that something profound is at work in business, society and human culture. We are undergoing a worldwide transformation from societies driven by the exchange of verbal and written information to societies dominated by visual imagery and visual communication. At the moment, numbers and letters continue to serve as the primary means of conveying and archiving information. But their long, uncontested dominance is waning. As the new millennium opens, visual information is in the ascendancy.

As was explained in earlier chapters, businesses increasingly are creating, storing and managing mission critical information in dynamic audiovisual forms. In the 21^st century enterprise, rich media (graphics, photographs, video and animation, plus audio) are more than pretty pictures designed to enhance information. Rich media are quickly becoming the primary knowledge base of the organization and multimedia illiteracy will soon be a serious concern for business and society.

Raising Rich Media

If that sounds like a melodramatic overstatement, think of the situation this way. Say you go to sleep tonight and when you wake up tomorrow every language in the world has disappeared, except French. There is an immediate problem. You and billions like you don't speak, read or write French. Except for a few hand gestures, you are completely unable to communicate. What happens next? First, of course, the French boast that this finally proves French is the one true language. Second, everyone who does not speak French must learn the French language immediately. You and everyone else on the planet must learn French vocabulary, spelling, syntax and all the other forms of speech. You must become verbally literate or you cannot do business or function well in society.

We are headed toward much the same situation with multimedia literacy. We are moving rapidly toward a day when visual communication skills will be as important as verbal communication skills. Just as today it is important to be able to write a coherent memo, one day soon it will be just as important to be able to craft a coherent video segment or artfully edit a sound file.

In her book, A Primer of Visual Literacy, Donis A. Dondis explains, "In print, language is the primary element, while visual factors, such as the physical setting or design format and illustration, are secondary or supportive. In the modern media, just the reverse is true. The visual dominates; the verbal augments. Print is not dead yet, nor will it ever be, but nevertheless, our language-dominated culture has moved perceptibly toward the iconic. Most of what we know and learn, what we buy and believe, what we recognize and desire, is determined by the domination of the human psyche by the photograph. And it will be more so in the future."

The language of visual communication, complete with composition elements and syntax, does not come naturally, as we might expect. Multimedia literacy, like verbal literacy, must be taught and studied. "Sight is natural; making and understanding visual messages is natural to a point, but effectiveness on either level can only be achieved through study," Dondis says. Understanding the basics of visual language, such as dots, lines, shapes, tone, color, textures, scale and motion, leads to "clearer comprehension of visual messages," she says.

In earlier times, business visuals and sound elements were relegated to the cover of the annual report, the screen behind the presenter or the photo of the founder on the wall of the boardroom. Charts, graphs, color photographs, video and film were prepared and used sparingly in the business environment due to the relatively high cost and time-consuming process of creating and distributing them. But that, too, is changing.

The dedicated tools and techniques of visual communication are no longer the sole domain of media professionals. There is scarcely anyone in the working world today who does not at least occasionally use some form of visual media for communication. The trend is moving in two directions. Because the taste level and hunger of media consumers is rising, the demand for media professionals is rocketing. At the same time, many non-media professionals, as they become more multimedia literate, are now routinely creating their own visuals and other media elements for communication.

The media-rich Information Age, in effect, makes everyone a de facto rich-media communicator. The speed and depth afforded by rich-media communication are valuable commodities in the Information Age. The bandwidth of multimedia communication is far greater than the bandwidth of unassisted text or numbers. As a result, rich-media information, tools and skills are rising out of the shadows and moving toward a level of communication importance traditionally afforded only to words and numbers. In short, multimedia literacy is destined to become the rule rather than the exception.

"We are moving into a time where image literacy is as important as textual literacy," says John Seely Brown, renowned chief scientist at Xerox Corporation and director of Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center.) "Artistic skills are becoming important again," he adds noting that Xerox is making a concentrated effort to spread multimedia literacy beyond the media department and into the corporate rank and file.

Audiovisuals not only enhance the communications process, they are central to it..

As noted in the introduction to Being Visual, in businesses everywhere there is a growing realization that multimedia communications is more than a tactical concern. The deployment and use of audiovisual communications and audiovisual communications tools have become strategic and competitive issues. Audiovisuals not only enhance the communications process, they are central to it.

Being Naturally Visual

The rise of the media arts in business and everyday communication can be interpreted as the end of literacy as we knew it or the beginning of literacy as we prefer it.

The media boomers, those individuals who have never known life without MTV or VCRs, have grown up with a clear preference for pictures. They don't see what all the fuss is about. Books have not disappeared. Just the opposite is true. More books are in circulation now than at any other point in human history and Amazon.com makes it possible to have almost any one of them on your doorstep tomorrow. Older generations may experience our multiplicity of media as chaotic and confusing. But to media boomers, it all feels quite natural, as if this is how we were intended to absorb and exchange information.

"There is a generational change at work," says John Warnock, Adobe Systems co-founder and chairman of the board. Young businesspeople are accustomed to the world of MTV and ESPN and to the constantly changing visual patterns, he says. "We are witnessing a major cultural change in the way we communicate."

That said, let me make it clear, the emerging visual information language, in business and elsewhere, is not a generational fad. Being Visual is not the Hula Hoop or Chia Pet of the moment. Everyone, whether they know it or not, is engaged in the process of learning to speak multimedia. As it is when you visit another country or culture, even without trying you immediately begin to absorb some of the language. It is well known that total immersion in a language is the best way to learn it.

By some estimates, the average person is exposed to more than 3,000 visual impressions each day.

We are becoming increasingly immersed in media. By some estimates, the average person is exposed to more than 3,000 visual impressions each day. Everywhere you look, you see media. In major markets, television viewers have access to 14,000 or more hours of programming per week. Web pages, of which there are hundreds of millions, contain an average of seven graphical images each.

We live in world awash in visual information, and we love it. For humans, ingesting information visually is a biological piece of cake. We're designed for it. Our perceptions of the world, the information we take in, as well as the signals we send out are overwhelmingly visual in nature. We think and dream in pictures and symbolic images. We replay and recreate life visually in our heads. Even when we read we transform the words into mental pictures. We all have little Spielbergs in our brains that give us insights and lead us to understanding by building models and crafting visual stories.

Visually we pull in and send out far more information through our eyes than all our other senses combined. We observe the complex facial expressions, eye movements and body language of the speaker. We take in the details of the environment. We make a visual note of clothing items and grooming habits as we scan and memorize the facial and physical characteristics of others.

The reason we are so visually oriented is purely a case of human physiology. Of all our sense receptors, our eyes are by far our most powerful information conduit to the brain. The retina of the human eye, which is actually an outgrowth of the brain itself, contains 150 million rod and cone cells for detecting changes in light and color. Those receptors send information to the cerebral cortex through two optic nerves consisting of one million nerve fibers each. By comparison, each auditory nerve consists of a mere 30,000 fibers. Neurons (nerve cells) devoted to visual processing number in the hundreds of millions and account for about 30 percent of the cortex of the brain, compared to a mere 8 percent of neurons devoted to touch and a paltry 3 percent for hearing.

With all that bandwidth to the brain, it is no wonder we perceive the world and communicate in visual terms. We read five times as fast as the average person talks. We register a full-color image, the equivalent of a megabyte of data, in a fraction of a second. When we watch a video, we are seeing about 24 to 30 megabytes of visual information per second. From that data we are able to distinguish remarkable details of depth, color, light and motion.

Without a doubt, the push for multimedia literacy is being driven by human architecture, observes Eliot Masie, founder of the Masie Center technology research group in Saratoga Springs, New York. "We live in a visual world. We are used to processing an enormous quantity of visual data, but not number or text data," Masie says. "Numbers and printed words are latter day inventions. Humans don't process a vast amount of numbers very well. As we explode the quantity of data, it becomes hard to process. In effect, by using visuals we are going back to our biological roots to deal with a data-rich world," he says.

Revisiting the Future

The digital tools for multimedia communication are taking us forward toward our past--back toward a time when images and sounds were the dominant or sole forms of human communication. That is not to say it's time to write the eulogy for the written word. Nor are we about to witness the entombment of numerals. But there can be little doubt that our technology has triggered a resurrection of visual communication that is taking us back to our audiovisual communications roots, physically and culturally.

Consider that until about 3,700 years ago all written forms of communication, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, were pictographic. People used stylized images to communicate information about objects and events in everyday life. The switch to written words composed of a compact phonetic alphabet was a boon to human society and triggered rapid advances in thought, commerce and social organization. But at that point, our visual communication skills began to take a back seat. For at least three millennia the technology to create, reproduce and distribute written words far outstripped the technology needed to mass-produce paintings, drawings, carvings, stamps and other forms of visual communication. Comic books notwithstanding, most documents today still favor sentences and paragraphs over forms and images.

Historically, visual images were reserved for art, cultural expression and mechanical drawings. The creation of visual images was the province of illustrators, painters, draftsmen and artisans, not the average person on the street or camel trail. Gradually, as literacy spread, the written word overshadowed the visual image everywhere, including education and even religion. In business, words and numbers ruled.

Because engravings were costly and required expertise, even the invention of Gutenberg's movable type printing press in the 1450s did little to restore visual communication to its former glory. Then, slowly, visuals began to make a comeback. Lithography and other forms of image reproduction helped, but it took the chemical processes of photography and finally the advances of electronics to turn visuals back toward mainstream communications.

The publishing of USA Today in 1982 is often cited as a visual communications watershed.

The publishing of USA Today in 1982 is often cited as a visual communications watershed. The national newspaper crowded out many of its words with color graphics in an effort to attract readers who preferred less text and more images. Critics lamented the decline of literacy--the end of the word is near--and predicted a grave future for the human intellect. But few noted the fact that visuals often communicate better, faster and clearer than text or spoken words. Certain types of information are better conveyed in a chart or graph. And pictures, especially if they are moving, can grab people's attention in ways words on a page cannot.

All of us, regardless of age or culture, have an inborn preference for seeing things. Through most of modern human history, it seems, we have suffered from a pent up demand for visual communication. Only now is that demand beginning to be met.

Demoting the Pencil

If you don't buy that premise, just take a look at the row of icons across the top of your screen, or the international symbols on restroom doors. We have come full circle from hieroglyphics to iconographics. The image is once again emerging as king of communication. And, just as vision dominates our senses, tools for rich-media communication are quickly penetrating our offices, schools and homes.

There are literally hundreds of instances, but in the business environment, Microsoft Corporation's PowerPoint presentation software is the most obvious example of the technology trend. The moment a businessperson creates his or her first PowerPoint slide, he/she becomes a visual communicator. Thanks to PowerPoint, visual communicators are being spawned by the millions. Microsoft has sold more than 150 million licenses of the Microsoft Office suite, which includes the PowerPoint program. If you add in estimates of pirated copies of MS Office, the number could be as high as 250-300 million computers in the world that have PowerPoint.

"PowerPoint is the main tool that brings businesspeople to grips with visual communication," asserts Simon Marks, Office XP Product Manager at Microsoft. He cites the fact that, according to some studies, knowledge workers spend more than 30 percent of their time doing some form of media-enabled presentation. That, says Marks, is clear evidence that business communication is quickly becoming ever more visual in nature.

Another telling example of visual communication's growth is the rapid deployment of Adobe Systems' Acrobat document-sharing software. In the past two years, there have been more than 50 million downloads of the Acrobat Reader software, which lets users view documents, complete with visuals, in a standardized file format.

Painting the Big Picture

As was pointed out in Chapter One, similar adoption and usage patterns can be tracked for almost all visual communication software and hardware. Multimedia tools are the pencils and paper of their day. And, like pencil and paper, they bring with them crucial literacy issues. A person with pencil and paper can write a letter or scribble nonsense. The key is literacy training.

We all know that learning to read the written word is far easier than learning to write a sentence. Likewise, consuming multimedia is far different from crafting it. Effectively creating and composing multimedia information for communication involves skills and understanding that most of us never received at home, at school or at work. Even with the emphasis on media in society today, most kids grow up in environments that stress reading and writing. For the most part, music, photographs, drawings and other media arts are still treated as extracurricular activities, hobbies or artistic pursuits.

We might think we are visual communicators because we naturally use gestures, body movements and facial expressions. Or, like those college students, we might think we are effective visual communicators because we use visual communication tools. But when it comes to illustration, video editing, sound editing and other multimedia communication skills, few of us have had adequate training.

Never has a modern society endeavored, on a large scale, to educate its people in the art and science of multimedia communication. Yet, that is exactly what must happen. It is safe to say that 100 percent of knowledge workers today are verbally literate. But it is also a safe bet that the overwhelming majority of businesspeople today are multimedia illiterate.

We know that social progress in the 21^st century is impossible without a well-educated, literate populace. We know that if you sign off on a letter or email with "Yours trooly," your credibility is out the window. It is now clear that the same is true for multimedia illiteracy. In a media-driven business world, the wrong image, the wrong music, even the wrong background color can torpedo your credibility.

Being Visual is shorthand for saying that multimedia literacy is the new and critical skill-set for all businesses and businesspeople. Multimedia literacy one day soon will be as central to success in business as reading and writing skills are today. As we move farther into the Information Age, we must relearn the communications skills of our deepest past or doom ourselves to failure in the future. It won't be long before multimedia illiterate companies will find they are no longer able to compete in a rich-media-enabled marketplace.

As it becomes apparent to all that media skills are the necessities--not merely the niceties--of life in the 21^st century, we might soon see the wife or the husband of the U.S. president taking up the cause of multimedia illiteracy: "Make America strong. Teach Johnny to edit video!"