Key terms and concepts
The web is a word medium. Many people think of the World Wide Web as something akin to broadcasting – probably because we use the web (“surf” is the term) on a computer terminal that looks like a television screen. But that isn’t the way to think of the web. Unlike their use of traditional television, users of the web read. Unlike their use of newspapers and magazines, they write. The web requires its users to be more physically involved -- interactive – than any other medium.
Because the web is a word medium, for many users it has become in information source. People go to web sites to find things out. A web site’s ability to provide information that people want helps the producers of that site sell advertising and make money. Many sites are dependent on the quality – not the amount – of information they provide for their users. Consequently, information must be good -- it must be well written and (have you heard this before?) accurate, complete, efficient and precise. In other words, writing for the web demands all of the same qualities that we have learned so far in this course about media writing.
Key terms and concepts
The following are some key terms and concepts that the student should understand.
Immediacy – The web has the immediacy of broadcasting but with more substance because it relies on the written, not spoken, word. When a news event occurs, most people turn to broadcasting, but increasingly they are also turning to the web for immediate information. This information is of a different nature, however. Information on the Web has to be written, not spoken. Consequently, it is more likely to have gone through an editing process than live broadcasting.
Permanency – The web has a permanency that broadcasting does not have. In broadcasting, once the words are spoken and pictures shown, they cannot be easily recalled by the viewer (unless the viewer is videotaping). When words or pictures are put onto a web site, they are there for as long as the server exists, and they are easily duplicated onto another server. (In fact, on many web site, that duplication is routine.) These words and pictures are also easily retrievable by the user, if the site is searchable. They are also retrievable by the journalists, who may want to establish links for the user to previously posted information.
Capacity – The web is not limited by time, as is broadcasting, and it is not (at least theoretically) limited by space, as is print. Consequently, people who are involved with the web do not face the two most enduring frustrations of journalists who work in the more established media. This nearly infinite capacity for posting information is having profound effects on how we view the web as in information medium, and those effects are not fully realized yet.
Flexibility – By flexibility, we are referring to the web’s ability to use almost any current form available for presenting information, such as words, pictures, graphics, video, and audio. The web writer needs to understand that this medium is not limited to words, but rather it can handle all of these forms and combinations that we might not yet have developed.
Interactivity – Individual users are far more prominent and important in the web environnment than they are with any other medium. Developers of web sites have established a variety of ways that individuals can interact, such as designing their own versions of a web site, chat rooms, polls, immediate responses to information, etc. This interactivity will continue to develop, and it too will have a profound effect on how people write for the web.
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