Elizabeth Royte & Medium Mechanics

Elizabeth Royte’s essay, “The Remainders of the Night”, had been about the kinds of garbage she finds in a certain park in New York. She goes around collecting trash with her litter mob every two weeks. During this, Royte finds lots of discarded items for sex like, condom and  tubes of lube, etc. This essay was posted on the website, Medium. She was able to take advantage of Medium as her platform for her essay to more effectively tell her story. Her use of images especially was effective. The way she had images that would take up the screen then a paragraph would rise onto the image as it blackedend while you scrolled, was very effective. This was able to put the words for that paragraph directly in with the image. She pared them together. This paring allowed the reader so see the paragraph with the image not only as a piece of the story but as a comment upon the image itself or as piece of text giving a little something more with the context of the image. This is not something you can simply do in say, a newspaper. The words would be all over the image and you could not see the image and the size of the images would not be that large. Speaking of this, there also would not be this many images in a newspaper. The amount of images helps the reader see what is going on and understand what Royte’s is seeing and what she means when she she says things in her essay. This amount of images would not be in a newspaper and if this was in a magazine, the images would not most likely, be as big. You would not be able to see exactly all the kinds of garbage because the images would be smaller and all you might see is just trash. You would not see the interesting finds that Royte finds, you would be like everyone, just seeing trash. The amount of images is a lot, including the little statistics. The statics that were with the paragraphs, actually sharing the space with the words, had information on litter in general as well as some statistics on sexual behaviors of gay men. This for one gives the reader an idea of how the litter problem is in our country as well as random bits of information what one might find interesting. In a print version, not all of these would most likely make it into the piece. It gives people a bit more and in other forms all these pieces may not be there. Medium as a platform for this essay was able to add extra meaning to it. The images that Royte including were important for how she told the story. They gave the story more meaning and especially with the paragraphs scrolling onto certain images, would not have happened. This gave certain words an extra meaning and extra context given to the images. Medium gave Royte the ability to do so and this extra meaning may have been lost in other forms to publish this story.