The world of tomorrow has already pushed the world of today into the past. Your speech classroom may not be equipped now for multimedia presentations, but as you move from college into the business world, you will encounter more and more sophisticated equipment for use in presentations. By the mid 1990s, over 65 percent of all corporations relied on multimedia presentations. Moreover, the present generation is growing up in a multimedia environment. Grade school and middle school students in Louisville and New York City use computers, videos, and digitizers to produce daily news shows.Your audience, and the audience you can expect to address in later business and professional presentations, may be quite attuned to multimedia presentations.
It is one thing to note this trend in the style of presentation aids and quite another to offer useful advice about it. Technology is changing so rapidly that any specific advice we give concerning multimedia presentations will in all likelihood be obsolete by the time you read these words. Because computers are central to such presentations, however, we can offer some helpful general guidelines and directions.

