Revolutionary books like Jakob Nielsen's Hypertext and Hypermedia lay the foundations for understanding multimedia alongside traditional cognitive science and interface design issues.
[1] 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[2] 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[3] and traditional concepts like genre, narrative theory, and stereotypes have had to be updated to take account of cyberculture.
Concepts like emotional design[9] and affective computing[10] are driving multimedia studies research to consider ways of becoming more seductive and able to take account of the needs of users.
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?"