Organizing Content for New Media Writing

Have you ever walked into a place, and had to take a moment to decide what you wanted to see first?  Consider a large museum, like the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, IL.  You can choose to start your tour by:

1.      Geography, perhaps the “Ancient Americas”

2.      By animal, perhaps the “Horses” exhibit

3.      By the science of paleontology, such as the “Rocks and Fossils” exhibit

4.      By the study of nature, such as the “Animal Biology” ehibit

Clearly, there are many different ways that a museum can choose to organize its collection of artifacts.  In my article, “Writing for an Interactive Audience,” I talked about how the introduction of new media allows us to write for mass customization as different people choose to read and access information differently.  However, this process of writing has its limits.

New media allows us to create many different content files; pictures, text, video, audio, animation, etc.  However, just as the museum curator who organizes the exhibits the public will see, we must still organize our collection of files into some manageable sequence, so that the user of our content will experience a natural flow from A to B or from A to R.  This way, we can ensure that the story is engaging and makes sense.

Writing to allow readers to navigate in and out of our content isn’t easy, especially if you’ve always written a linear, mass consumption, story line.  As we write for a Brave New World of multi-media, multi-sensory reading, we must consider three concepts:

1.      Diversity

2.      Movement

3.      Community

Diversity

Up until the time the Internet really took off, around 2004, all these forms of communications were predicated upon a linear reading experience. How many times have you been told to not “skip to the end”? In writing for a mass audience, we negated the individuality of readers. Today, through hyper text links embedded in web pages connected on the Internet, one need only point and click. Many people have multiple windows open at the same time, as they skip from the text/video/animation file to the next – all connected by mouse clicks. Ten years ago, this was not possible. As the internet evolves, the way we presently read/interact on the Internet will continue to change. Writers must plan now for the diversity in how people will interact, not merely read, content.

Movement

Traditional writing is the creation of a story that follows logical progression. It’s linear. Readers will interact with material. Let’s say you’re reading a novel about the ancient land of Kush, which is part of modern day Ethiopia and Sudan. You want to learn more about a place called Gebel Barka, and the author has conveniently inserted a hyper link that lets you do just that. You go to the site, read about it, and come back to continue the story line. In this way, the reader can move through content , so that a book is no longer a linear story. Instead, it has become a portal through which people connect to discuss meaningful questions.

Community

Do you have the skills needed to write a book, produce a movie, design a game, and create technical animation? I know I don’t! To do this, I must plan on collaborating with a community that can help me produce a story that leverages these different kinds of skill sets. A social networking tool called a Wiki lets us work with a community of skilled collaborators. One company that makes wikis available is PB Works – click here for a link with a video about their service:

But not only do we need a community to help us develop our writing, but we need to be part of a community that helps us share it. Thus, social networking through sites like Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, My Space and others have grown in importance.

How we prepare and organize content for a multisensory information interaction experience is changing. No one person can master all the facets such a new world of communicating entails. What are you doing to prepare yourself to collaborate, compete, and thrive in this environment? I’ve recently begun to expand my connections through facebook, blogging, and hubpages.

I invite you to visit me on these sites as we continue this high tech journey into a linked in world.