Exercise #4

For this assignment, I went to http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/, which is a music site. A website is the best way to present this material, because of the multitude of information the site contains. The site has different sections for breaking news, music reviews, and interviews among other things, all of which are hyperlinked and can be accessed at the click of a button. If this was in a biweekly magazine, much of the new content would still be there, but the archives wouldn’t be as readily available, and that would be a shame because the archives are one of my favorite things about this website. I can access different music reviews for both a new and upcoming band, and also an older band I missed the first time around.

The advantages the website has over other forms of communication, such as a print text, are readily apparent. For one, as I mentioned before, the user has full access to the archives of the website, and can access anything from an old interview, to an old music review. It also has the capability to be extremely up to date on the breaking news, because new information can be added relatively easily very quickly. The information can be accessed as many times as the reader would like, because all of the information is written down, and that is an advantage to a live oral/multimedia presentation. Another nice thing about the internet is the unlimited capability to be creative. The information is presented on a computer screen, so that allows the different musicians to be able to be as creative as they want, because they won’t have to pay extra to print it in color or incur other additional charges that are commonly found in printing.

To translate the information on this site to fit into a printed text or oral presentation would not be very difficult, because the majority of the information is text based. For one, the new interviews, music reviews, and other items found in paragraph form could be put into a magazine, or summarized in a PowerPoint presentation. Overall, the efforts to make this site print based would not be that difficult.

Once the move has been made to printed media or oral presentations, the connotations associated with the website also change along with it. The portability would drastically increase if the site was move to print based, as it is easier to move a magazine than a computer. The ‘breaking news’ feature of this site would have to be sacrificed because information can’t be updated as soon as it’s printed. The size of the articles and amount of pictures/design elements would also have to have a word limit, so as to make sure to fit in the limited space of a printed text or the limited amount of time in an oral presentation. If this site went to a different medium, the end product would look and feel drastically different than what it is today.