Natalie Szymanski, Graduate in Rhet/Comp
This webpage text works to explore the complex connections, relationships, and interplay between and among media systems by analyzing case study examples of various advertising campaigns. Using current media theorists like Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, this text examines the nuanced ways media systems borrow, imitate, and remediate the systems before and after them. The webpage's argument moves chronologically to explore the ways in which radio advertising borrowed and remediated print and oral advertising traditions and the ways in which later tevevision advertising incorporated and expanded on print, oral, and radio advertising techniques. The webtext ends with an analysis of the recursive nature of these advertising media systems, contending that media systems do not simply replace one another as time and technological innovation marches on. Rather, media systems exist simultaneously, creating complicated, interrelated, dialogic networks of media and communication.
This is one of the most comprehensive webtexts I have created as a graduate student. Part of my own scholarship works to examine how multimedia and multimodal texts can communicate complicated scholarly arguments not only in new ways but in more productive and efficient ways than traditional alphabetic texts. This page includes images, texts, videos, and slideshows that construct an argument that simply could not be made with purely alphabetic text alone.
