User Content Afforded Success: Imgur as a Digital Platform
Media theorist Lev Manovich dedicates his academic endeavors to "new media" based in "software that is always in flux" (Software Takes Command 2). Throughout The Language of New Media and Software Takes Command, Manovich addresses the technological basics and qualities inherent to digital media objects that have exploded in popularity since the advent of the personal computer, concepts that many users simply ignore, concepts that deserve exploration. Most of our interaction with these digital media artifacts occurs on the front end, rather than the code-heavy, corporate back end. Despite our investment in what Danah Boyd calls the "always-on lifestyle," most casual users of digital media are unaware of what interesting structures lay beneath the flashy user interfaces they interact with almost constantly ("Participating in the Always-On Lifestyle" 71). As Galloway points out in his book The Interface Effect, "[n]ew media hide as much as they show," so these obfuscated structures underneath the face of digital media actually outnumber their front end counterparts (61). One such hidden object deserving of exploration is that of the platform, the technological and ideological base from which all constructed media objects are built up from. While there are many platforms present within digital media, as well as in more traditional analog media, few are more collaborative, user focused, technologically simplistic, and all inclusive than Imgur. Founded in 2009 as an image hosting site for the popular content sharing website Reddit, Imgur has, over the years, differentiated itself from Reddit and become a platform for an entirely new, diverse community driven by user submitted content. The popularity of this simple image hosting site has risen to the point that recently, the population of Imgur's community has grown larger than that of its "parent" site Reddit. Afforded multiple qualities by its digital nature, Imgur as a platform serves as a point of departure towards an online world of community created culture and multifaceted interaction.
Before this essay can work towards proving its thesis, it must be proven that Imgur fits the definition of a platform. If Steven E. Jones and George K. Thiruvathukal are to be believed, a platform is an incomplete product, "a base or foundation upon which people can build" (126). In the digital realm, the entire Web can be considered a platform, but so can individual websites, so long as their software operates above the level of a single device ("What is Web 2.0" 33, 48). Imgur is both. It is a foundation for an entire community of "imgurians" that call the site home. The posts and reposts on the site are often reblogged, reused elsewhere on the Onternet, which spreads the influence of Imgur far and wide from its humble base. User submitted, arguably the main user gallery of uploaded images and .gifs, is an example of a product that grew out of the original design of Imgur as an image hosting site. Instead of merely hosting the images, user submitted opens the door for communication among users by allowing them to vote on content and comment on every uploaded image, rather than simply look at it. Comments themselves can also be voted and commented upon. Those familiar with Reddit will note that this is exactly what Reddit does, with the exception of hosting the images. Imgur, while it may be a branch off of the platform of Reddit, which in turn might be considered a branch off of 4chan and other imageboard/chatroom platform sites from older eras of the Internet, has earned the right to be called its own platform. Even those working on maintaining Imgur admit that their website and community, which go hand in hand, "is expanding beyond its initial intents," clearly showing growth from the original platform.
As mentioned before, Imgur has eclipsed Reddit in terms of popularity and user traffic while continuing to innovate, create variations on its original theme, build off its base platform. Imgur's creator, Alan Schaaf, has said that Imgur addresses problems that the entire Internet faces: complicated problems with image hosting (VentureBeat). By cutting out the middlemen, Imgur established itself as a platform for user submitted content that drives the direction the site travels in today. A meme generator was introduced, allowing users to create and post memes (in this case, image macros with culturally coded meanings) directly on Imgur spurring on creativity and expansion of the site's influence and popularity. There are even plans to add a program to the site that allows users to create .gifs directly. All of these pieces have existed in some form or other elsewhere, but the same can be said about platforms like the Atari 2600. Video gaming, even console gaming already existed when the Atari 2600 debuted, but the innovation and incorporation of various technical tactics to port games onto the system and create new methods of coding games marks it as one of the prime examples of a digital media platform (see Racing the Beam by Montfort and Bogost). Imgur works in the same way. By recreating, re-coding other digital media artifacts within its domain, Imgur builds upon itself, with the help of its creators and users, to establish itself as a viable digital media platform.
Just as digital media are nothing without their platforms, a detailed report on a specific platform would be incomplete without a look at its own fundamental basics. Imgur wouldn't be a very sturdy digital media platform if it did not take advantage of what Janet Murray calls the four affordances of the digital medium. Though Murray, in her book Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice, is discussing the computer and the affordances given to it by its digital nature, all digital media artifacts created with computers directly or by example are afforded the same qualities and abilities (51). The first affordance, the fact that digital media are procedural, is the main reason why Imgur is known as "the simple image sharer." Imgur's code, its application programming interface (API), while it may be a standard programmatic interface, "strives to master complexity by creating abstract representations that describe elements of systems in the most general terms" as Murray says procedural media should do (Inventing the Medium 52). In allowing programmers to create applications that branch off of Imgur while still utilizing the technological aspects of it, Imgur sufficiently serves as a platform for further digital expansion. The algorithms behind Imgur's user submitted gallery also take advantage of the abilities afforded to it by its procedural nature. For example, Imgur's mobile application (yet another offshoot from the Imgur platform to allow for further interaction), relies on Gruntfiles to synthesize the complex limits of Imgur's code into compact, easily recognizable, yet abstract, tasks. Most of this is done behind the front end of one's interaction with the various images and voting systems present in user submitted, which again shows how Imgur's technical basics and abstractions are procedural. Technically speaking, Imgur faces millions of inquiries, uploads, and other user activities on a daily basis, and its internal algorithms and technology remains robust; the code rarely fails to deal with large amounts of traffic and remains workable as Murray believes successfully procedural media, and by association, platforms, should.
This large amount of data and the reason why there are so many different clusters of caches and search parameters and back end processes is due to Imgur's gigantic online community. As a site founded on the principles of user submitted content, sharing, and cultural communication, Imgur relies heavily on Murray's participatory affordance of digital media. Again, this affordance relies heavily on the technical creations of programmers. They must "script both sides [of the interaction] so that the actions of humans and machines are meaningful to each other" (Inventing the Medium 55). This carries all of the implications of the procedural affordance with it. On one level, Murray's participatory affordance represents a relationship of communication and exchange between user and the digital media platform's interface. Imgur's AVI, for instance, allows for any popularly used modern programming language (Java, Python, etc.) to communicate with it. This allows programmers from multiple backgrounds to participate in creating new applications for Imgurians to use, thus expanding Imgur's digital boundaries. Though the overall code of Imgur has very limited emergent behavior - it does not become self aware or submit images itself - an individual's interaction with the front end of it allows for Imgur as a platform, to extend its reach. The interface allows for the user to have direct manipulation of their submitted content, a concept afforded by the participatory nature of digital media (Inventing the Medium 61). The level of usability afforded by this access makes it more likely that individuals that have browsed Imgur or other sites like it in the past without uploading anything (lurkers) will eventually become users because it is so easy to participate, to expand the database of Imgur.
This is where the participatory affordance introduces a new level of interaction. Murray notes that "participation in digital media increasingly means social participation," that is to say, communication and exchange between individual users mediated by the platform and its associated applications (Inventing the Medium 56). This is Imgur's strongest, most apparent digital media platform quality. Imgur's creators believe in "trusting users as codevelopers" ("What is Web 2.0" 51). The user submitted gallery is made up of solely user submitted content, hence the name. Whether they are searching for internet fame, entertainment, or pure diversion, users self perpetuate their gallery through participating in it. None of the images are compressed, which allows image purists the ability to maintain their image quality and size if they wish, further enticing potential users to add to said database. Imgur, then, becomes more than an image hosting site. It is a cultural database of constant interaction and participation. Users collect information from the cultural zeitgeist (online and off) and re-purpose it into content posted in the form of images, .gifs, crafty titled submissions, comments, and even votes on content (upvoting it to send it to the front page or downvoting it into oblivion, in Imgur parlance). All of these actions, coupled with a simple, internal system of reputation points, not only add to the collective database, but spur on further creation and interaction in the form of heated arguments, new memes, and the broadening of an already large cultural lexicon. As a platform, Imgur is also, for the most part, self-moderated; in this way, the participation factor is raised up another notch because users regularly interact with the content of the site apart from the original posters of the content and apart from the media in which it resides. Participation through the Imgur platform, therefore, verges on the meta-textual at all times, since users interact with the user submitted content bearing what they know of the overall Imgurian database of stereotypes, in-jokes, and common references.
At this juncture, the encyclopedic affordance of digital media comes into play. Murray discusses this affordance on two fronts: the digital and the cultural. Media convergence, on both of these fronts, is the unifying factor that enables Imgur to subsume other digital media (meme generators, discussion boards, etc, as previously mentioned) and build upon its platform base (Inventing the Medium 66). All of these digital media converge and condensate on Imgur's platform, revealing new directions the site can expand into. On the digital front, the design of Imgur's various galleries promotes a fluidity of access and interaction. No one user will have the same experience due to the technologically governed, constant fluctuation of image location of the front page, depending on how many positive votes it has received. Murray would say that the database of Imgur has adopted true segmentation (Inventing the Medium 69). Rather than a linear path through the user submitted content, users can travel, theoretically, in a random path through the represented data of the site and witness a modern day example of Eisenstein's montage. While this digital montage, collision of images, is random and arguably devoid of overarching intentionality and singular meaning, the user's feelings about their experience with Imgur (which include learning new cultural codes specific to Imgur, discovering new facts, finding camaraderie, etc) is greater than the sum total of the content they were exposed to. Regardless, what is obvious is that Imgur, both as a digital media artifact and as a platform for social interaction and digital creation, has grown into a cultural and digital database of cultural codes/cues and digital code/programs; it is an encyclopedic database. With every submitted image acting as an access point to the entire database (thereby having the potential to become its own platform for further digital interaction), Imgur certainly takes advantage of the encyclopedic affordance of digital media in that it is "concrened with minimizing ambiguity and maximizing accessibility" (Inventing the Medium 70).
Lastly, the spatial affordance of digital media, according to Murray, grants digital platforms with the ability to better streamline their users' interactions through, among other means, a graphical user interface (GUI) (Inventing the Medium 71). Mainly, this affordance, like previous ones, expands the reach of Imgur's original platform by streamlining user interface. Galloway notes that a high degree of fetishism is required to facilitate this (The Interface Effect 60). For example, a symbol of a cloud with an arrow pointing upwards on it serves as Imgur's upload button (uploading to the proverbial cloud, as it were). Users quickly become accustomed to the fetishized objects on the screen and recognize them not for what they are, but for what they represent, like a "folder" on a computer screen which represents a specific place to store information in a fetishisticly localized area. Overall, Imgur's simple layout is its best ally, and is often touted as the reason why many have chosen to become Imgur users exclusively over Reddit which maintains a detrimental GUI that is not altogether straightforward to the casual user. In utilizing the last affordance of digital media, the spatial affordance, properly, Imgur, as a platform, has proven itself as a potent, rapidly expanding, user friendly digital media artifact.
Platforms, specifically, operate to the effect that Murray believes interactive digital media should since they satisfy their own aims while advancing the digital medium by "refining or creating the conventions that best exploit" the four affordances of digital media (Inventing the Medium 51). Imgur, therefore, is a successful platform in that it takes Murray's affordances and builds an entire community using them. Its growth is limited only by what its users can post, and how far the desire for content can take it. In conclusion, Imgur sprouts a fundamentally uniquely cultured, digital community database from its original image hosting platform by subsuming other digital media artifacts and augmenting them to become easily adaptable, accessible, readily usable interfaces. While other websites perform similar digital feats, Imgur, arguably, takes better advantage of the qualities afforded by its digital nature in order to spread its influence more rapidly and communally.
Although it is beyond the scope of this report, a small post script about how this bit of digital media studies relates back to cinema studies is forgivable. Imgur, as a platform, is not unlike the cinema. It is a conglomeration of images, messages edited together by each unique user into their own nonsensical narrative. As mentioned before, this is a kind of digital montage, if Eisenstein wrote about digital media. Its participatory nature compounds this montage by relying on memes, image macros, and popular or heavily utilized .gifs to create meaning out of apparent randomness. In a way, Imgur's community acts as a hivemind, as one voice with many parts continuously digesting cultural happenings outside the realms of Imgur, decoding signs in preparation to bring them back and add them to the database. These memes, etcetera, become figures, to be decoded, read, by individuals from the overarching hivemind, on the level of Martin Lefebvre's theories in his essay "On Memory and Imagination in Cinema." With this connection, if further academic pursuit was warranted, Imgur and other digital media platforms might be compatible with psychoanalytic theories, or even Neoformalist analysis as if they were directly compatible with films.
Works Cited
Boyd, Danah. "Participating in the Always-On Lifestyle." The Social Media Reader. Ed. Michael Mandiberg. New York: New York University Press, 2012. 71-76.
Galloway, Alexander R. The Interface Effect. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2012.
Jones, Steven E. and George K. Thiruvathukal. Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT PRess, 2012.
Manovich, Lev. Software Takes Command. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013.
Murray, Janet H. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2011.
O'Reilly, Tim. "What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software." The Social Media Reader. Ed. Michael Mandiberg. New York: New York University Press, 2012. 32-52.
Before this essay can work towards proving its thesis, it must be proven that Imgur fits the definition of a platform. If Steven E. Jones and George K. Thiruvathukal are to be believed, a platform is an incomplete product, "a base or foundation upon which people can build" (126). In the digital realm, the entire Web can be considered a platform, but so can individual websites, so long as their software operates above the level of a single device ("What is Web 2.0" 33, 48). Imgur is both. It is a foundation for an entire community of "imgurians" that call the site home. The posts and reposts on the site are often reblogged, reused elsewhere on the Onternet, which spreads the influence of Imgur far and wide from its humble base. User submitted, arguably the main user gallery of uploaded images and .gifs, is an example of a product that grew out of the original design of Imgur as an image hosting site. Instead of merely hosting the images, user submitted opens the door for communication among users by allowing them to vote on content and comment on every uploaded image, rather than simply look at it. Comments themselves can also be voted and commented upon. Those familiar with Reddit will note that this is exactly what Reddit does, with the exception of hosting the images. Imgur, while it may be a branch off of the platform of Reddit, which in turn might be considered a branch off of 4chan and other imageboard/chatroom platform sites from older eras of the Internet, has earned the right to be called its own platform. Even those working on maintaining Imgur admit that their website and community, which go hand in hand, "is expanding beyond its initial intents," clearly showing growth from the original platform.
As mentioned before, Imgur has eclipsed Reddit in terms of popularity and user traffic while continuing to innovate, create variations on its original theme, build off its base platform. Imgur's creator, Alan Schaaf, has said that Imgur addresses problems that the entire Internet faces: complicated problems with image hosting (VentureBeat). By cutting out the middlemen, Imgur established itself as a platform for user submitted content that drives the direction the site travels in today. A meme generator was introduced, allowing users to create and post memes (in this case, image macros with culturally coded meanings) directly on Imgur spurring on creativity and expansion of the site's influence and popularity. There are even plans to add a program to the site that allows users to create .gifs directly. All of these pieces have existed in some form or other elsewhere, but the same can be said about platforms like the Atari 2600. Video gaming, even console gaming already existed when the Atari 2600 debuted, but the innovation and incorporation of various technical tactics to port games onto the system and create new methods of coding games marks it as one of the prime examples of a digital media platform (see Racing the Beam by Montfort and Bogost). Imgur works in the same way. By recreating, re-coding other digital media artifacts within its domain, Imgur builds upon itself, with the help of its creators and users, to establish itself as a viable digital media platform.
Just as digital media are nothing without their platforms, a detailed report on a specific platform would be incomplete without a look at its own fundamental basics. Imgur wouldn't be a very sturdy digital media platform if it did not take advantage of what Janet Murray calls the four affordances of the digital medium. Though Murray, in her book Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice, is discussing the computer and the affordances given to it by its digital nature, all digital media artifacts created with computers directly or by example are afforded the same qualities and abilities (51). The first affordance, the fact that digital media are procedural, is the main reason why Imgur is known as "the simple image sharer." Imgur's code, its application programming interface (API), while it may be a standard programmatic interface, "strives to master complexity by creating abstract representations that describe elements of systems in the most general terms" as Murray says procedural media should do (Inventing the Medium 52). In allowing programmers to create applications that branch off of Imgur while still utilizing the technological aspects of it, Imgur sufficiently serves as a platform for further digital expansion. The algorithms behind Imgur's user submitted gallery also take advantage of the abilities afforded to it by its procedural nature. For example, Imgur's mobile application (yet another offshoot from the Imgur platform to allow for further interaction), relies on Gruntfiles to synthesize the complex limits of Imgur's code into compact, easily recognizable, yet abstract, tasks. Most of this is done behind the front end of one's interaction with the various images and voting systems present in user submitted, which again shows how Imgur's technical basics and abstractions are procedural. Technically speaking, Imgur faces millions of inquiries, uploads, and other user activities on a daily basis, and its internal algorithms and technology remains robust; the code rarely fails to deal with large amounts of traffic and remains workable as Murray believes successfully procedural media, and by association, platforms, should.
This large amount of data and the reason why there are so many different clusters of caches and search parameters and back end processes is due to Imgur's gigantic online community. As a site founded on the principles of user submitted content, sharing, and cultural communication, Imgur relies heavily on Murray's participatory affordance of digital media. Again, this affordance relies heavily on the technical creations of programmers. They must "script both sides [of the interaction] so that the actions of humans and machines are meaningful to each other" (Inventing the Medium 55). This carries all of the implications of the procedural affordance with it. On one level, Murray's participatory affordance represents a relationship of communication and exchange between user and the digital media platform's interface. Imgur's AVI, for instance, allows for any popularly used modern programming language (Java, Python, etc.) to communicate with it. This allows programmers from multiple backgrounds to participate in creating new applications for Imgurians to use, thus expanding Imgur's digital boundaries. Though the overall code of Imgur has very limited emergent behavior - it does not become self aware or submit images itself - an individual's interaction with the front end of it allows for Imgur as a platform, to extend its reach. The interface allows for the user to have direct manipulation of their submitted content, a concept afforded by the participatory nature of digital media (Inventing the Medium 61). The level of usability afforded by this access makes it more likely that individuals that have browsed Imgur or other sites like it in the past without uploading anything (lurkers) will eventually become users because it is so easy to participate, to expand the database of Imgur.
This is where the participatory affordance introduces a new level of interaction. Murray notes that "participation in digital media increasingly means social participation," that is to say, communication and exchange between individual users mediated by the platform and its associated applications (Inventing the Medium 56). This is Imgur's strongest, most apparent digital media platform quality. Imgur's creators believe in "trusting users as codevelopers" ("What is Web 2.0" 51). The user submitted gallery is made up of solely user submitted content, hence the name. Whether they are searching for internet fame, entertainment, or pure diversion, users self perpetuate their gallery through participating in it. None of the images are compressed, which allows image purists the ability to maintain their image quality and size if they wish, further enticing potential users to add to said database. Imgur, then, becomes more than an image hosting site. It is a cultural database of constant interaction and participation. Users collect information from the cultural zeitgeist (online and off) and re-purpose it into content posted in the form of images, .gifs, crafty titled submissions, comments, and even votes on content (upvoting it to send it to the front page or downvoting it into oblivion, in Imgur parlance). All of these actions, coupled with a simple, internal system of reputation points, not only add to the collective database, but spur on further creation and interaction in the form of heated arguments, new memes, and the broadening of an already large cultural lexicon. As a platform, Imgur is also, for the most part, self-moderated; in this way, the participation factor is raised up another notch because users regularly interact with the content of the site apart from the original posters of the content and apart from the media in which it resides. Participation through the Imgur platform, therefore, verges on the meta-textual at all times, since users interact with the user submitted content bearing what they know of the overall Imgurian database of stereotypes, in-jokes, and common references.
At this juncture, the encyclopedic affordance of digital media comes into play. Murray discusses this affordance on two fronts: the digital and the cultural. Media convergence, on both of these fronts, is the unifying factor that enables Imgur to subsume other digital media (meme generators, discussion boards, etc, as previously mentioned) and build upon its platform base (Inventing the Medium 66). All of these digital media converge and condensate on Imgur's platform, revealing new directions the site can expand into. On the digital front, the design of Imgur's various galleries promotes a fluidity of access and interaction. No one user will have the same experience due to the technologically governed, constant fluctuation of image location of the front page, depending on how many positive votes it has received. Murray would say that the database of Imgur has adopted true segmentation (Inventing the Medium 69). Rather than a linear path through the user submitted content, users can travel, theoretically, in a random path through the represented data of the site and witness a modern day example of Eisenstein's montage. While this digital montage, collision of images, is random and arguably devoid of overarching intentionality and singular meaning, the user's feelings about their experience with Imgur (which include learning new cultural codes specific to Imgur, discovering new facts, finding camaraderie, etc) is greater than the sum total of the content they were exposed to. Regardless, what is obvious is that Imgur, both as a digital media artifact and as a platform for social interaction and digital creation, has grown into a cultural and digital database of cultural codes/cues and digital code/programs; it is an encyclopedic database. With every submitted image acting as an access point to the entire database (thereby having the potential to become its own platform for further digital interaction), Imgur certainly takes advantage of the encyclopedic affordance of digital media in that it is "concrened with minimizing ambiguity and maximizing accessibility" (Inventing the Medium 70).
Lastly, the spatial affordance of digital media, according to Murray, grants digital platforms with the ability to better streamline their users' interactions through, among other means, a graphical user interface (GUI) (Inventing the Medium 71). Mainly, this affordance, like previous ones, expands the reach of Imgur's original platform by streamlining user interface. Galloway notes that a high degree of fetishism is required to facilitate this (The Interface Effect 60). For example, a symbol of a cloud with an arrow pointing upwards on it serves as Imgur's upload button (uploading to the proverbial cloud, as it were). Users quickly become accustomed to the fetishized objects on the screen and recognize them not for what they are, but for what they represent, like a "folder" on a computer screen which represents a specific place to store information in a fetishisticly localized area. Overall, Imgur's simple layout is its best ally, and is often touted as the reason why many have chosen to become Imgur users exclusively over Reddit which maintains a detrimental GUI that is not altogether straightforward to the casual user. In utilizing the last affordance of digital media, the spatial affordance, properly, Imgur, as a platform, has proven itself as a potent, rapidly expanding, user friendly digital media artifact.
Platforms, specifically, operate to the effect that Murray believes interactive digital media should since they satisfy their own aims while advancing the digital medium by "refining or creating the conventions that best exploit" the four affordances of digital media (Inventing the Medium 51). Imgur, therefore, is a successful platform in that it takes Murray's affordances and builds an entire community using them. Its growth is limited only by what its users can post, and how far the desire for content can take it. In conclusion, Imgur sprouts a fundamentally uniquely cultured, digital community database from its original image hosting platform by subsuming other digital media artifacts and augmenting them to become easily adaptable, accessible, readily usable interfaces. While other websites perform similar digital feats, Imgur, arguably, takes better advantage of the qualities afforded by its digital nature in order to spread its influence more rapidly and communally.
Although it is beyond the scope of this report, a small post script about how this bit of digital media studies relates back to cinema studies is forgivable. Imgur, as a platform, is not unlike the cinema. It is a conglomeration of images, messages edited together by each unique user into their own nonsensical narrative. As mentioned before, this is a kind of digital montage, if Eisenstein wrote about digital media. Its participatory nature compounds this montage by relying on memes, image macros, and popular or heavily utilized .gifs to create meaning out of apparent randomness. In a way, Imgur's community acts as a hivemind, as one voice with many parts continuously digesting cultural happenings outside the realms of Imgur, decoding signs in preparation to bring them back and add them to the database. These memes, etcetera, become figures, to be decoded, read, by individuals from the overarching hivemind, on the level of Martin Lefebvre's theories in his essay "On Memory and Imagination in Cinema." With this connection, if further academic pursuit was warranted, Imgur and other digital media platforms might be compatible with psychoanalytic theories, or even Neoformalist analysis as if they were directly compatible with films.
Works Cited
Boyd, Danah. "Participating in the Always-On Lifestyle." The Social Media Reader. Ed. Michael Mandiberg. New York: New York University Press, 2012. 71-76.
Galloway, Alexander R. The Interface Effect. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2012.
Jones, Steven E. and George K. Thiruvathukal. Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT PRess, 2012.
Manovich, Lev. Software Takes Command. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013.
Murray, Janet H. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2011.
O'Reilly, Tim. "What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software." The Social Media Reader. Ed. Michael Mandiberg. New York: New York University Press, 2012. 32-52.