It's All Elemental My Dear Wiki; A Look at Different Elements and Mediums of a Technological Era

The archetypical essay is comprised of key elements: an introduction, a body, a conclusion. But do these elements make the argument more effective? Does the reader's comprehension rest in the assurance that these elements will appear in a written work? When reading a text from a handout, or even in a pdf file, the text is contained in a certain space. The pdf file can be closed and opened, and yes the text can be copied, but usually no altercations to the text itself can be made. Mark Amerika's "Hypertextual Consciousness" on the hand was not a succinct piece of text. The text took place in a different medium, which is on the Internet as a succession of hypertexts that linked to different pages with different ideas. This text was not a stereotypical essay, but it did convey meaning just as a printed form would.
I have found that text, in my opinion, is most valuable to me in a medium where it is stable. An essay is easiest to comprehend when it is in a non-changeable format. Professors usually desire a hard copy to an emailed copy and the value of turning in actual paper seems more profound than turning it in through D2L or email.
The Internet to me always has seemed more informal. Writing a blog does not elicit as much effort as a paper, and a tweet certainly contains little to no effort or skill on an author's part. I am sure that there are those who would disagree with me fully, proclaiming tweets to be the new wave of literature or some other cyber-nonsense, but those people are naive and pop-culture junkies.
PowerPoint's are always an interesting topic to me. They seem somewhat outdated and high school-ish. Creating a PowerPoint presentation is almost the same as creating a tweet. A slide contains attention grabbing information and in a flash it is replaced by another thought. PowerPoint is required by a lot of professors and teachers alike. They seem to believe it to be an essential tool for college students. In some classes more points were awarded for having a PowerPoint than a poster. Essentially they usually do the same thing: distract students from listening to the actual presentation.
Not to say though that one can not pull off a rockin' PowerPoint that highlights potentially confusing information or key aspects, but seriously more focus is spent on flashy effects in most PowerPoint presentations.
My view may be jilted because after all, I am still in school. PowerPoints, blogs, and tweets can be more mature and relevant in the quote-unquote real world that adults talk about so warningly. Twitter is used widely in marketing and advertising now, just as many businesses have a facebook or a myspace page, or both. Famous people mention twitter to get more people to follow them, and I have seen businesses that want you to obtain a certain amount of followers before you can apply to work at their company (the name of the company that did that eludes me, but it was a "you need to be well known enough to work for us" kind of thing).
After writing a paper, making a fake tweet, writing a blog, and creating a powerpoint I prefer the old fashioned type essay kind of medium. But even as those words spill onto the keyboard I remember how hypocritical that sentence is. I am writing a text on a computer, which I will copy and paste onto a blog, which a multitude of people can access all over the world. The advances in technology make life certainly easier. I can choose many more mediums of writing than people ever could before, and though the elements are different, the message can still be understood.