Blackwell Reference Online

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Multimedia is the integrated use of more than one medium of communication, usually mediated through digital computing technologies. “Multimedia” is a term with a complex and ambivalent history that risks being either too narrow or too broad in its meaning. In its narrower sense, it was closely associated with the dead-end that was CD-ROM interactive multimedia in the mid-1990s. In its broad sense, multimedia can refer to any text, technology, or event that combines more than one medium of communication: a meaning so broad that it fails to denote any distinctive cultural form. Any definition of multimedia therefore needs to operate between these limits. Multimedia has specific meanings in different contexts, including performance, libraries, social semiotics, and computer science. In spite of these complications, recent attention on multimedia has raised some significant wider questions about media and communication. Before multimedia was computer-based and interactive, the term sometimes referred to presentations using multiple slide projectors with dissolve systems and synchronized music to deliver carefully choreographed linear sequence of images with a soundtrack accompaniment. Such systems were commonly used in museum exhibits, educational presentations, and popular culture happenings in the 1960s and 1970s. Another earlier use of the term was for multimedia resources and teaching ... log in or subscribe to read full text