“The key is to strike a balance between convention and innovation, even as the line between image and text, between orality and literacy, between art and critique, and, indeed, between scholarship and pedagogy grows evermore fuzzy.”

Nowadays, many scholarly works are not conventional essays or papers, on the contrary they are quite innovative. Kuhn’s video and Wesch’s The Machine is Us/ing Us both display different ways of bending towards the innovative side of things by using multimedia to portray an idea. In many senses, this is a good thing because some things can be better developed and explained through the use of multimedia. However, at the same time this cannot be taken too far to the point where we venture too far away from conventional text methods.

In Wesch’s video, he explores the endless possibilities of the internet and computers. He is able to show the viewer amazing insights into different aspects of computer programming and how we as humans contribute to the development of computers. He poses the question in the title, are we the computer or is it that the computer is controlling us and using us for it’s benefit? This is an interesting concept because in a sense we not only use these computers, but our use also helps the computers learn in the process.

Through Kuhn’s work, we can see the idea of displaying things that otherwise couldn’t be displayed on paper. Kuhn utilizes multimedia to display a point that would not be understood through conventional text. The style in which she presents it adds to the understanding by the viewer. She also utilizes an aspect of memory by repeating scenes multiple times to embed them in the viewer’s mind.