MM1 Introduction

MM1-d Composing has changed

MM1-dComposing has changed

Composing has, in some ways, changed significantly in recent years. Today’s composers write blogs, record podcasts, craft digital stories, prepare slide show presentations, design Web pages, post status updates and news, and much more. The ways in which composing has changed result primarily from a few recent technological innovations:

The speed with which we can share and distribute documents. No longer do we have to take the time to print a document and mail it to others; instead, we can zip it along to others via e-mail, social media, or shared composing spaces.
The ease with which we can draw on multiple media in one document. Word processing applications, for instance, allow writers to incorporate images. Web page creation spaces encourage composers to embed links to video-sharing sites like YouTube.
Access to a range of media and materials. When writers wanted to compose a multimodal document before computer software made it easy to do so, they would have to physically cut and paste—with scissors and glue—to embed images in a textual document. Today, electronic copy-and-paste functions allow writers to almost seamlessly pull media from different online spaces and move those media across applications.

Together, these changes provide a broader context for composing and for sharing texts. Both the composers of centuries-old manuscripts and the composers of days-old YouTube videos thought about their purposes for communicating, the audiences they were trying to reach, the technology available to them at the time, and which modes were most useful in communicating their ideas.