What is Best?

Twitter, Essays, Blogs, and PowerPoints? Where is a person to begin with all of the options that are open to us today to communicate? Twitter is short & sweet and generally about what the owner is doing and/or writing. Essays are formal and used to disseminate large amounts of information. Blogs can be informational or simply about the writer's point of view. PowerPoints are meant to convey information to audiences quickly. Which is the best one to use?

I have never used Twitter simply because to me it implies that I am self-absorbed. Not to say that what I say is true. I have seen people use Twitter to let people know about events, posts on blogs, breaking news and more. I simply prefer not to be limited to 140 characters when I can have as many as I want using other forms of media.

Essays are more where my interests lie. Essays can be any length needed. They can be full of pictures, too much information (at times), and complex ideas that Twitter cannot support. Essays can get long-winded and disorganized Twitter cannot become long-winded--there is not enough space to! The happy medium for me are Blogs.

Blogs allow writers to write as much as they need as well as embed video, pictures, audio, etc. Blogs can link ("I link therefore I am") to outside websites to make things clearer or expand on a point. Blogs can get to a lot of people like Twitter. Blogs can be as long as necessary like an essay. These things make the blog a favorite of mine: large audience and however long I want.

PowerPoint, oh PowerPoint...what can I say. PowerPoints force users to follow a format in some ways. .PPT can be uploaded to the internet and even embedded in webpages to play on demand. PowerPoint is a love and a bane of mine. When I use PowerPoint I get caught up in the design details, what to put on the slide, how I want the slide to look, the order that the slides appear. The list goes on. PowerPoint forces a form like Twitter, but it also lets the writer go on and on (if need be) like an Essay. When people use PowerPoint they tend to read from the slides rather than expanding on the information on the slides. We all saw this in class recently. Many people, my own group included, read right from the slides and only deviated when we got to the final part of each presentation: questions and discussion.

In the long run people are drawn to the types of media that allow them to do what they need to do. In my case, I like to make sure that I am clear so I prefer blogs or essays. Others want quick--short communication that Twitter provides. Businesses want everyone to get necessary information so they use PowerPoint. Others still prefer Essays to explain complicated information.