Advantages and disadvantages of multimedia technologies?

Answer 1

An advantage of multimedia technologies is the ability to streamline your life. You no longer have to carry around multiple devices. A disadvantage is the fact that they can be costly and complex.

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Problem is, this is such a subjective field. Who is this "you"?

This is deliberately rather provocative to make my point that the first answer is that subjective, and to suggest that the subject blurs need and want.

Is that "you", me? No. I neither need nor wish to, "carry around multiple devices"; fashionable or not. I might have a camera and a portable phone but that's all, because I don't normally need more. My phone is text and voice only (plus a few accessories like a simple calculator) because that's all I need. And it is switched off for far longer than it is on. My car's sat-nav is usually safely at home because most of my journeys are familiar to me, even a 600-mile round-trip I make about twice a year. A friend calls it "sat-nag"! The computer I'm using now uses Win7 but Mickeysoft keeps sending "Upgrade to Win10" pop-ups. Why? To make all my applications unworkable, turn "Excel" from good to ghastly and render my data unreadable?

Yet another reader here may be the complete opposite: may have made him/her-self so reliant by self-perception, advertising or peer pressure on a mass of little black boxes - or one little box combining the set - as to feel lost without it.

Streamline your life? Have you made it a burden that needs "streamlining"? If so, is it because you have become addicted to gadgets because you can rather than for genuine help? Do you really need to watch TV, sell your Russian oil-shares or play "Armageddon Comes Again 4" on your phone's tiny screen? Can you participate in a social gathering or sit in a concert-hall without its continual presence? Do you even know how to switch it off?

So are there genuine advantages and disadvantages - apart from cost which is a function of complexity anyway? Or is it better to ask, what are the advantages and disadvantages for your own life?

Oh, darn, battery's flat. There goes my million-rubles in shares chance and I've missed "Gone With The Wingding"!