Video blogs, podcasts, tweets, Instagram, Tumblr. These are just a few of all the outlets people use nowadays to communicate to an audience. The avenues of communication have changed so much in recent history. It used to be basically limited to letters, speeches, and in person communication. Now someone can tweet 140 characters and get a large message out to a huge audience.
These changes in the forms of communication are why it is so important that we understand how to effectively use multimodal writings. It is important to have different tools of communication at your disposal because you must be able to communicate i
n ways your audience can comprehend. For example, in today’s world young people have drastically short attention spans.
A majority of kids can not focus through an entire speech or read a well written essay without losing focus. This is the main reason why the forms of communication have changed so much. People have turned to shorter and quicker forms of communication so that they keep the attention of their audience, and as your audience changes often times so must your form of communication.
The benefits of these shorter forms of communication are that people can put out information way quicker than ever before, and the new forms of writing encourage creativity. On the other hand, these new mediums of writing also have negative effects. The writings we see displayed on outlets like twitter often lack a lot of context. What I mean is that a person might write something and make a claim, but they have given no background to the preexisting conversation they have joined. This is a problem because an audience needs to know what is being said or has already been said in a topic of discussion in order to form an educated opinion on a topic.
Overall, as far as writing goes I do not think we can form a conclusion that these new forms of communication are neither good nor bad, but what we can say is that they have changed our world for the mean time.