The new media story is a unique way of interpreting traditional stories by using modern technology and methods. There are several key elements that help to make the new media story more accessible and easy to use for users. This new trend in the media story is an addition to the traditional print story.
Hypertext is one of the fundamental elements of a new media story that helps to lead to another page by clicking the link. For example, when you click the logo of Facebook, it takes you to the Facebook main page that shows you the news feed, posts, and other details. It helps users quickly move from one document to another one with associative links.
Navigation is an integral part of designing an online site which makes the site more user-friendly. A user who comes first time to an online historical site or archive, with the help of a search page, the user easily gets the resources that he needs. The Sport of Life and Death: The Mesoamerican Ballgame, a funded museum site, focused on the basic history of Mesoamerican culture from 1500 B.C.E., mainly for K 12 students is a well-designed site with a navigation feature. Fonts, animations, images, graphic design, and mainly interactive clickable maps make the website more accessible to users. Another example is Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy website which uses two separate search options such as “Search the Database” and “Miscellaneous Searches” which help users to search for their required information easily.
A simple and straightforward website design increases the number of users. The choice of Font style, Font color, Font Size, and Theme are crucial components in building a new media story. If the choice of font color is not going with the theme, it’s very hard for users to read the text. A good web design brings the reader’s attention and brings more traffic to the site. The combination of correct graphics, maps, and images makes the content more elegant and easy to understand. All of these elements make the website structured, more visually appealing, and more informative to the user.
In traditional story-telling, the main emphasis is given to the situation or events from the ancient era. We can notice these trends in the works of Plato and Aristotle – the repetition of Classic tradition, that is representation of life to the audience or Mimesis. In Contrast to the traditional print story, the digital media story focuses on representing the folk, not the series of events or situations.
The context of the printed version of the book is hard to change after printing, but in digital storytelling, one can easily change the context by using HTML. The printed version of the book looks the same to all its thousand of users as it printed the same material in the same way, but in the web version, this may be different from user to user depending on how the user’s browser interprets HTML according to its operating system and web browser. This consistency is not in the hand of the creator. Depending on the screen sizes, the size of pixels varies from one screen to another screen – it causes slight changes of color on each computer.
To conclude, both versions of media have their own features. In this twenty-first century, with the rapid growth of technology, the new media story flourishes for its easy accessibility and user-friendly digital resources.
I am so fascinated by the concepts you brought up in your post this week, Ria! I hadn’t even thought about hypertext in the context of a digital story, and it honestly makes me a little giddy thinking about the layers of narrative building that can be created using hypertext. Your thoughts on web design are *so* insightful to the differences between new media storytelling. I’m so enthralled by how the fluid nature of a web site versus a print text can impact the development of the story. Overall, your blog this week was super engaging and I feel like I have a better grasp on what Alexander was pointing to in his definitions of new media storytelling.