Biography - Multimedia Forms

Multimedia Forms

With technological advances in the twentieth century, multimedia biography became more popular than literary forms of personality. Along with documentary Biographical films, Hollywood produced numerous commercial films based on the lives of famous people. The popularity of these forms of biography culminated in such cable and satellite television networks as A&E, The Biography Channel, The History Channel, and History International.

More recently, CD-ROM and online biographies have appeared. Unlike books and films, they often do not tell a chronological narrative: instead, they are archives of many discrete media elements related to an individual person, including video clips, photographs, and text articles. Media scholar Lev Manovich says that such archives exemplify the database form, allowing users to navigate the materials in many ways. (Manovich 220) Twenty-first century web 2.0 applications, such as Annoknips.com enable users all over the world to compile their own biography and illustrate it with other people's photos.