In an early issue of Wired magazine, famed technologist Nicolas Negroponte reflected on what he termed modern multimedia and what we today might call Interactivity, Cross-platform operability. One of his points was that in the future (like today) multimedia would need to be able to have, "fluid movement from one medium to another, saying the same thing in different way." For some reason this got me to thinking about China and the Chinese language and I wondered what Mr. Negroponte would think of each. Based on the article here is my fictional inverview with him:

BCH: How do you see the development of multimedia in China?

NN: Well from a fundamental standpoint, China should be at the forefront of the multimedia revolution. Multimedia is intuitively part of daily life here. The written language. Chinese characters are at once both visual and aural/oral. Take for example the character for knife. Here you have a charcater that requires one to move simulataneously from a visual domain (the character looks strikingly like a knife) to the acoustic domain (saying oral pronunciation of the character) to the text domain (reading the romanization of the character and the pronunciation) and the mental domain (understanding the specific tone used for the character). This movement from domain to domain would must likely occur thousands of times a day to a normal Chinese person and so I would risk a guess that the idea of multimedia resonates albeit subconsciously in the Chinese society.

BCH: Hmm, interesting. Do you see any concrete examples of this resonance?

NN: Yes. Last night as I flipped throught the channels on my hotel TV I realized that more than half the movies that stopped on included Chinese subtitles. The results of this are that most Chinese that watch TV regularly are experience what Marshall McLuhan would say hot and cool media stimulus. Hot in the sense that watching movie emphasizes one sense that of vision with very little actual involvement in filling in the details of the moving images and cool in the sense that reading the characters requires more effort on the part of the individual to understand what is going on. This then is the multimedia at its best. So for all these reasons it wouldn't surprise me if China would eventual be the leader in the development of multimedia.

Now, I've never met Negroponte and it is very likely that I may have a garbled understanding of both his and McLuhan's theories of media but on one level it makes sense, at least to me. The reality is that I see no actual proof of it. It looks to me that the kings of multimedia continue to come from the West. But it's just a theory that popped into my head after reading that article. Perhaps it's all yet to come.