I’ve spent twenty years in print media, telling stories on paper with words and photographs, so sometimes my colleagues look askance at my immersion in projects such as Newsweek’s CD-ROM and online ventures. Is this yet another challenge to the dominance that the word and still image once held on the imagination of the world? I assure my coworkers that our efforts aren’t likely to make anyone of my generation obsolete: with luck, maybe someday new media will help pay our pensions.

But the real reason for my interest in the new technology is much deeper: I believe that multimedia, far from undercutting text and the still image, is the best thing to come along for both since the advent of television. Multimedia, in fact, can do much to restore the value of the word and still image in a world temporarily overwhelmed by passive video.

I say “temporarily,” because television as it exists today is an unfinished medium. Indeed, a few generations from now, kids will wonder why we put up with our broken boxes for so many decades before we thought to repair them. Now, with the dawn of interactive multimedia, the television repair job has begun–-text and the still image can achieve parity with video–-and books like Still Images in Multimedia are both the inspiration and instructions for the work that needs to be done.

The simple flaw in conventional “passive” television is that it allows the user no control over timing, which renders it inherently hostile to print and still images. Both are forms that require individual time to regard. No person reads, comprehends or enjoys text and images at the precisely same rate as any other.

That’s why, on television, when one wants to present text, scrolling is unsatisfactory (since reading rates differ) and directors are left with what I call the “PBS method,” where the star astronomer or philosopher walks across an open field and recites her lines while an elaborate tracking shot tries to keep it all looking lively. These days, whenever I see an awkwardly strolling narrator reciting a lengthy paragraph, I long for a “text” button on my television remote control.

Similar constraints exist for still images in passive video. Every once in a great while, someone lets a Ken Burns do a video documentary primarily composed of stills, but it’s a risky gamble for television, where lingering over an image a moment too long can result in wholesale zapping by an impatient audience. In a cruel irony, however, even as television’s lockstep timing provided no new venue for classic photojournalism, the sudden proliferation of video imagery in the Fifties hastened the death or downsizing of many existing media outlets for the still image.

And so, in the early 90s, when video first became widely available for CD-ROM-based multimedia, developers raised on television imagery were at first disappointed that for storage reasons they could use only relatively short pieces of video in their early productions. Some turned to multiple still images as “surrogate video” –and now we’re coming to understand that sequenced stills, far from a video substitute, are a powerful story-telling technique on their own. In addition, for the new multimedia audience, 15 seconds of passive video often feels like the rest of their life. As information consumers newly in control of our electronic media, we don’t want to be forced to watch anything we haven’t chosen to watch–-and if we’re interested, we want it to stay on the screen until we’re done.

Curiously, passive television is itself trying to overcome its fundamental flaw with stylistic devices. Consider MTV-style video editing, which is now so quick-cut that it often becomes, de facto, rapidly sequenced stills. But those “surrogate stills” aren’t under viewer control-–and there’s a fundamental difference between composing a sequence of stills grabbed from video and building one of true still images. One might think of a video clip, composed for motion, as a single word-–take one frame out of it and it’s often only as powerful as a single letter. On the other hand, a stream of still images is more like a sentence-a single frame maintains the meaning and resonance of a complete word.

In short, new media–CD-ROM, the Internet, interactive television, or however we finally learn to deliver our bits, offers the opportunity for a remarkable renaissance in the art and appreciation of the still image. We mustn’t let the moment slip away. It will grow ever easier to incorporate full-motion video into interactive communications, and as that happens, the still image needs to have firmly established its place and importance in the grammar of the medium.

That’s a tall task in an electronic medium that–by virtue of engineering–seems so suited to video and so removed from paper . But I’ve worked with few people more capable of the challenge than Mikkel Aaland. Mikkel combines a firm understanding of what can be done today with a keen vision of what will be done tomorrow, informed by a deep regard, both artistic and technical, for the roots of the still image. Still Images in Multimedia clearly sets forth both the techniques and the opportunities; the future of the medium is up to us.