【2017年整理】18与电子信息类专业英语(二版)课本_李白萍.ppt

Unit Six Multimedia;Passage A What Is Multimedia? 　　Interest in multimedia is currently pervasive—entertainment and educational groups are exploring new applications, and the computer, telecommunications, and consumer electronics industries are actively developing underlying technology. As a term, “multimedia” frequently used but rarely defined. Among hardware and software engineers, attempts to provide a meaning range from the whimsical “multimedia definition” (multimedia is when you have too many cables) to those emphasizing communication or interaction (Grimes and Potel,1991). It is difficult to pin down the essence of multimedia since the term appears in numerous contexts, each with its own nuances. Computer users have multimedia presentation, multimedia workstations, and multimedia databases, but the people involved the presentation authors, ;workstations designers, and database researchers view multimedia from different perspectives. One point where they agree, however, is on the essential role played by multimedia data.[1] For instance, multimedia presentations, as their name suggests, involve the presentation of multimedia data, multimedia workstations deal with the processing of multimedia data, and multimedia databases with its storage and retrieval. Perhaps, then, the notion of multimedia data is a unifying thread to digital multimedia.;　　So what is multimedia data? Let’s first look at the related notion of media data. McLuhan, in Understanding Media, considers media as “extensions to man”, as technologies and products giving our senses access to further forms of information.[2] This very broad definition encompasses two more specific views. The first relates the term media to how information is conveyed and distributed; for instance, we have print and broadcast media. Second, we also use the term media when describing the materials and forms of artistic expression. This occurs when we speak of digital media, not in the sense of digital storage media, b