Multimedia studies as a discipline came out of the need for media studies to be made relevant to the new world of CD-ROMs and
hypertext in the 1990s. Revolutionary books like Jakob Nielsen's
Hypertext and Hypermedia lay the foundations for understanding multimedia alongside traditional cognitive science and interface design issues. Software like
Authorware Attain, now owned by
Adobe, made the design of multimedia systems accessible to those unskilled in programming and became major applications by the end of the 1990s.
Recent challenges The Internet age that has been growing since the launch of
Windows 98 has brought new challenges for the discipline including developing new models and rules for the World Wide Web. Areas such as usability have had to develop specific guidelines for website design and traditional concepts like genre, narrative theory, and stereotypes have had to be updated to take account of
cyberculture. Cultural aspects of multimedia studies have been conceptualised by authors such as
Lev Manovich,
Arturo Escobar and
Fred Forest. The increase in
Internet trolling and so-called
Internet addiction has thrown up new problems. Concepts like emotional design and affective computing are driving multimedia studies research to consider ways of becoming more seductive and able to take account of the needs of users.
Media studies 2.0 Some academics, such as
David Gauntlett, have preferred the neologism, "Media Studies 2.0" to multimedia studies, in order to give it the feel of other fields like
Web 2.0 and Classroom 2.0. The media studies 2.0 neologism has received strong criticism. Andy Medhurst at Sussex University for instance wrote of the media studies 2.0 neologism introduced by David Gauntlett, "Isn't it odd that whenever someone purportedly identifies a new paradigm, they see themselves as already a leading practitioner of it?" ==Issues and concepts==