A Closing Circle: Back to Authoring

Since the turn of this century, we have seen striking developments in multimedia technologies that let communication means flourish, through which people now can easily share their interests, opinions, visions, prejudices, hopes, fears, fetishes, the here and now, their inner state in measurement, or simply glimpses of the richness or boredom of their everyday lives. These technologies have revolutionized people´s lives by altering the ways they learn, investigate, negotiate, and argument in public and private as well as how they meet, date, and befriend. In this reflective piece, Frank Nack argues that, for the development of multimedia technologies, social media research should focus on the interaction and communication basics of the different media and how they can be added into representations that actually help to improve human communication in digital environments.