<coolness>: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog

By James Rennie

My blog is a disaster. I rarely update it more than once a week; many posts are only a paragraph or two in length; at least half of the YouTube videos I've posted in the past year are no longer available. All in all, I can't say that my tiny corner of the Internet is shaking the foundations of conglomerated mainstream media. But at least it looks cool. My design scheme is quite pleasing to the eye, from font selection to the colours in my sidebar; the videos I post tend to be musical performances by indie artists and bands; the categories I assign to various postings are ironic, tongue-in-cheek references to assorted Internet memes. Some who visit my blog will be struck by the lack of content. At the risk of self-aggrandizing, however, I would like to suggest that these people are missing the point. The medium, as we've been quoting, mantra-like, for forty years, is the message; after all, isn't the coolness of blogging to be found in the act of blogging, and not in the actual 'content' produced? New Media technologies such as blogs, wikis, social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, etc.) and chat programs are thoroughly tangled up with issues of design, aesthetics, social status and consumerism. This essay will attempt to unravel these strands, by focusing on the unique relationship between the technologies of the Internet and the cultural character of Cool. While many critics have discussed the New Media's apparent predilection for pastiche and bricolage (Ewen 1988, Lanham 1993, De Kerckhove & Dewdney 1995, among others), I believe the notion of Cool can provide a valuable point of entry for a more detailed analysis of creativity in the age of the Internet. Both the characteristics of particular New Media technologies (why certain design features emerge instead of others) and the culture of Cool into which these tools emerge (both as consumer goods and cultural icons of Cool itself) are relevant. I will argue that contemporary media producers – including occasional bloggers such as myself – are not limited by the dominant modes of pastiche and bricolage found online. Rather, the affordances of New Media tools help create the space for political resistance and original artistic expression, in a way that marries the cultural power of Cool to the radical communicative potential of digital networks.

In order to understand how the New Media can make the most mundane technical achievements exciting, it is worth briefly considering the broader cultural environment surrounding the rapid expansion of the Internet. (Although the complete history of the Internet, from Turing's post-war work to Berners-Lee at CERN, is certainly relevant, I will focus on the 1990s as the time when both access to and general knowledge of the Internet grew exponentially.) Given that many of the Internet's busiest sites today deal in video (YouTube), photography (Flickr), and music (iTunes), it could certainly be argued that the 'new' technology of the Internet is simply giving us the 'old' content that we enjoyed prior to the Internet's creation. While these sites undoubtedly accelerate and expand the means with which individuals can access such content, I believe it is important to consider one of the key ways in which we choose to use this new medium: to distribute the content of older media. Apple continues to negotiate for the right to market the digital catalogues of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin. With a hundred dollar's worth of equipment from Circuit City and a weekend of free time, I can transfer my collection of old Star Trek episodes to an FTP server, or to a BitTorrent archive. I can also post last night's 'Weekend Update' on YouTube, Facebook and beyond, if it was actually funny. While these activities certainly don't constitute the entirety of Internet use, they are indicative of a culture that revels in nostalgia, reruns, and 'oldies' music stations. The songs, films, books and TV shows that shaped our own experiences are now available to us with a single click of the mouse; our desire to re-visit these cultural artifacts, however, did not suddenly spring forth with the release of the first web browser.

In identifying the early 1990s as the palimpsest upon which the genealogies of both modern computing and Western Cool merge and re-make themselves in each other's image, I feel obliged to consider a number of key cultural movements from that period, each marked in its own way by features and functions generally grouped together as 'postmodern.' The marked increase in the cultural displays of pastiche and bricolage, from the introduction of the great postmodern sitcom family, The Simpsons, to the commercial successes of rap music and hip-hop culture, signals a creative shift towards the aesthetics of sampling. This aesthetic ahs been deployed for artistic purposes (the mythical roots of hip-hop, purportedly free from capitalist intrusion), comedic value (the satiric edge of The Simpsons, to be borrowed and sharpened by South Park and Family Guy), and unadulterated commerce (the rise of the ironic, postmodern advertisement, summarized by Goldman & Papson 1996). Indeed, the technique of sampling – of borrowing liberally from the iconic body of Western popular culture – has come to form an unquestioned logic underpinning a great deal of contemporary media. The degree to which New Media technologies re-enforce such logic will be addressed below. What I feel must first be stressed, however, is the prevalence of pastiche and sampling that existed in mainstream popular culture prior to the growth of the Internet.

The recent history of Western pop culture is brimming with examples of these and other decidedly postmodern tactics. What interests me about this cultural history, however, are the aesthetic and affective markers it shares with contemporary New Media discourse; in particular, I seek to explore the unique character of Cool. The category of Cool seems to apply equally well when discussing The Simpsons as it does when discussing blogs and wikis. I do not wish to focus exclusively on either structural/narrative similarities (are blogs Cool because they, too, borrow ironically from mainstream media?) or on aesthetic/design similarities (are blogs Cool because they attempt to subvert authority in an edgy yet glamorous manner?). Rather, I propose an analysis that sees the two approaches as fundamentally inseparable. Pulling apart form and content is never an easy task, but I think the ambiguous terrain of Cool further complicates the process. On the one hand, the cultural 'face' of Cool is at times remarkably similar to the seductive profile of the advertising industry. From the hip birth of cool in smoky jazz clubs [warning: actual clubs may not resemble nostalgic descriptions] to the 1950s motorcycle rebel, from the counter-cultural icons of the 1960s to the Punk rebellions of working class youth in the 1970s, the genealogy of Cool is practically the How-To manual for corporate marketers (see Thomas Frank [1997], among others).

Equally confounding is the growing interplay between Cool culture and the realm of labour; when the boundaries begin collapsing between personal and professional, between public and private, and between work and home life, Cool quickly invades the office, the factory, the classroom, and the boardroom. As Alan Liu asks, what does it mean to be Cool, "when both the subcultural 'outside' of older cool [now called 'niche markets'] and the countercultural 'far out' of 1960s cool have been fenced in by networks that integrate differentiation with the corporation?" (2004: 139). There is something decidedly unCool about the office, about the computer, about the Internet; quite simply, these are the spaces and machines of mainstream Western rationalism – the very things against which Cool should be positioning itself. Nevertheless, Cool has infiltrated the dreary grey world of commerce and industry. Liu notes that there is undoubtedly some process by which "knowledge workers clutching a console in a cubicle" come to see themselves as Cool in the same sense of "the jazz musicians, black British or African American youths, white greasers, and other such subcultures exiled from knowledge work during the early to mid-twentieth-century" (2004: 76-77). Getting to the bottom of this process, however, is no simple task. The dominant genealogies of Cool, as presented to us by the historians in the advertising industry, centre around resistance, rebellion, and the outsider's knowing gaze: James Dean holding a cigarette at just the right angle; John Coltrane riffing in a tiny Village café; Elvis Presley's hips, too provocative for primetime television. This historical framework of Cool remains an inescapable feature of contemporary Western culture, owing in large part to both our own individual nostalgic yearnings and to the marketing world's ability to turn these yearnings into captivating re-assemblages of memory and consumerism.

In order to grapple with present-day Cool technologies, therefore, one must consider these multiple versions of the past, in which, argues Mary Helen Specht, "Cool was originally an attitude of defiance, a response to existential anomie and a way of remaining unfazed and in control" (2006: 600). Is it possible that contemporary Internet Cool is similarly defiant, or that blogging allows us to remain 'unfazed and in control'? I believe some elements of this line of argument need to be considered, in light of the postmodernist cultural turn toward sampling. To re-phrase the question, how is it that, given a cultural climate of pastiche and bricolage, certain New Media tools can be both Cool (a subversive attitude, a defiant act) and unCool (the HAL9000 in the office, the mainstream corporate stare)? From the revolutionary potential of blogs to democratize mainstream media journalism, to the violent economic shocks felt by the music, television and film industries, it would seem that the very essence of the Internet is of change, reversal, and de-centralization. Yet when we read these changes in tandem with cultural trends and tastes, a more nuanced picture of the Digital Revolution emerges: a picture of consumer desire, conglomerate corporate control, and of produced/consumer feedback loops that have taken us down particular technological avenues, perhaps at the expense of more attractive alternatives. Can New Media tools really be Cool, or is it our understanding of Cool itself, shaped by decades of advertisements and corporate efforts to create Cool for profit, that needs re-visiting?

Blogs and Wikis and Hypertext, Oh My! The Bricoleur Goes Digital

Working through the tangled mess of Coolness, although an inherently unCool endeavour, can be a rewarding journey in the academic world. In 2004, Papson, Goldman and Kersey recounted their attempt to create a summary of their research efforts (what the old timers used to call a 'journal article', I believe) using only the tools available to them online. Despite a few initial obstacles, they ultimately produced a slick, well designed website summarizing their work, Landscapes of Capital: Representing Time, Space, and Globalization in Corporate Advertising. Reflecting upon the project, they note the central importance of an often-overlooked New Media technology – Hypertext – and its effects on the entirety of the creative process. Hypertext, they write, "lends itself to bricolage," and ironically, while it often amplifies "the chaos of the electronic flow, it can function as a flexible and dynamic tool that can impose at least a momentary semblance of order on segments of cultural texts" (2004: 1639). The function of Hypertext, it seems, is that of organizing principle first, and design tool second. In emphasizing the ways by which the Hypertext 'user' employs bricolage, Papson, Goldman and Kersey invoke a particular definition of the bricoleur, borrowed from Lévi-Strauss, that points to the importance of particular modes of organization in a digital age. As Lévi-Strauss (1966) wrote, although "It might be said that the engineer questions the universe, while the 'bricoleur' addresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from human endeavors," what must be kept in mind is the degree to which "the engineer is always trying to make his way out of and go beyond the constraints imposed by a particular state of civilization while the 'bricoleur' by inclination or necessity remains within them" (qtd. in Papson, Goldman & Kersey 2004: 1639). If Hypertext is to be seen as the New Media tool par excellence, the implications for the Coolness of blogs, wikis, Facebook and MySpace are inherently structural; the digital bricoleur, according to Papson, Goldman and Kersey, organizes cultural detritus according to the non-linear logic of Hypertext, creating meaning and order by virtue of the tools at hand.

What strikes me in this summary of Landscapes of Capital is the notion of digital bricolage creating temporary order within otherwise chaotic vortexes of information, in the service of broader aesthetic, creative endeavours. This suggests that part of the Internet's Coolness comes from the structuring functions that support content design, rather than from the originality or uniqueness of specific content itself. A similar argument is made by Jeff Rice – which I will examine in greater detail below – concerning the inherent Coolness of Hypertext within composition studies; this Coolness, he writes, "derives not from its supposed 'hip' nature (as many popular Web sites tend to stress through cool sites of cool links lists) but rather from an interlinking, juxtaposed writing" (2007: 80). What, then, do we make of Hypertext's 'other' persona, which exists outside of composition studies, academic writing, and artistic expression? If, as Liu and others have argued, the Coolness of digital bricolage must reckon with the Coldness of the Knowledge Economy (and its inherent reliance on the same New Media tools used by the bricoleur), it seems as if two distinct trajectories of Cool are colliding rather than converging. For despite the allure of the digital bricoleur making meaning where the engineer sees only rational, purposeful information, an inescapable fact of 21^st Century life is that one can be both an engineer and a bricoleur at the same time. As Liu writes, when we "strip away all the colorful metaphors of information seas, webs, highways, portals, windows, and the rest," what we are left with "is only the stark cubicle of the knowledge worker. Yet precisely in this cold space of nonidentity, cool appears as the cultural face – perhaps not the best or truest face, but the interface by which it knows itself – of knowledge work" (2004: 76). Pinned between the palpable Coldness of the engineer and the hopeful Coolness of the digital bricoleur, where does one find a theory of Cool that can reconcile the contradictions of life online? Must we choose between the instrumentality of machines that increasingly define both work and play, and the imaginative assemblages of digital authors dressed as cyber-punk antique dealers?

McLuhanisms to the Rescue? Understanding New Media and its Affordances

The first approach to Cool I wish to consider is one put forward by Rice, which is a very clear response/rebuttal to Liu's book, The Laws of Cool. In The Rhetoric of Cool, Rice insists that Coolness is much more than a mere cultural face to be photographed, catalogued, and categorized. The Internet, he argues, is not simply a collection of particular Cool sites; the Coolness of the web, inherently linked to the structuring possibilities of Hypertext, is to be found in the medium itself – in a very McLuhanesque manner. Before we can appreciate the effort needed to "produce knowledge in what McLuhan names 'The Gutenberg Galaxy,'" Rice argues, "we are obligated to learn the rhetoric of a newly emerging electronic apparatus centered in acts of appropriation, sampling, hacking, and other related moves" (2007: 29). Concerned more with the rhetoric of digital bricolage than with the aesthetics of the project, Rice points squarely to technologies and tools in his search for Cool. He goes so far as to argue that Internet content, be it political, artistic or other, has little influence on the overall Coolness of particular sites. Citing the somewhat overused example of Adbusters, Rice points to the politics of the Adbusters act, rather than the politics of specific Adbusters content; Adbusters is cool, he writes, "not because of its ideological positions regarding advertising and consumer culture but rather because of how it employs appropriation in noncomplacent manners for digital display" (2007: 60). Arguably, then, it is entirely possible for more mainstream and corporate content producers to create equally Cool sites, without any form of subversive, resistant message to spoil the fun. Depending on how one interprets Rice's use of the term 'noncomplacent,' it is easy to imagine the Coolness of Adbusters popping up in ads for Absolut Vodka, Apple Computers, or the Gap. In this way, Rice is attempting to move beyond models of Cool that over-emphasize the aesthetics of rebellion, such as the model he believes Liu to have advanced. What is rebellious, revolutionary, and ultimately Cool about Adbusters is not the anti-corporate stance it takes; the Coolness is in the technique, the tools employed, and the subversive act of re-assembling images in unique ways. "We don't have to agree with the message in order to apply the strategy," writes Rice; rather, we need to see that the purpose of digital bricolage is simply "to foster new ways of restructuring language and thought" (2007: 62).

The question remains, however, as to whether or not such a purpose is innate to New Media technologies themselves. Could blogs, wikis, and other Hypertext applications be used in other ways, which would not lend themselves so readily to Coolness? Given the many intersections between the cultural and corporate uses of New Media, it still remains to be seen how specific tools can themselves be Cool, regardless of the content/message produced. In order to develop Rice's analysis such that it can incorporate a broader spectrum of New Media experience, I believe it is useful to consider the trajectories along which specific New Media tools have developed. Like McLuhan before him, Rice can be accused of a certain degree of determinist thinking. Tools such as blogs and Facebook have not simply emerged from thin air, nor are they released to a public unversed in culture, technology or politics. As I have argued, the cultural milieu surrounding the rise of the Internet was already well defined by the aesthetics of sampling and pastiche. Given these cultural conditions, it is worth trying to imagine how New Media tools could have been designed in radically different ways. In his analysis of how blogging has impacted journalism, Lucas Graves turns to the idea of 'affordances' in order to contend with a similar question of design. Building on the research of Gaver (1991) and others, Graves looks to affordances – the features of a technology "that make a certain action possible" – as a possible 'third way' between determinism and constructivism (2007: 332). Affordance theory, in ways not unlike the historical frameworks of communication first proposed by Harold Innis, suggests that the technological (tools, techniques, and processes) emerges and develops in tandem with the human (desires, needs, and values). It is virtually impossible to consider the history of one apart from the other, which in turn is why so many theories of technology end up inadvertently privileging one over the other, thereby placing it in the 'driver's seat'. As Graves notes, however, the idea of technological 'affordance' is both unique and highly useful to New Media studies, in the way "it hints that potential exerts its own pull" (2007: 335). If New Media tools such as blogs and wikis do in fact contain a Cool 'potential,' (perhaps, as Rice and others argue, to be found within the logic of Hypertext), then the resultant 'pull' may in fact be greatly assisted by cultural tastes and preferences.

To return, then, to my blog, I can begin to see how a theory of affordance helps to explain both the predictability of my content, and the sense of Coolness that I still maintain when discussing my blog as a whole. Rather than insisting that my blog is Cool, simply because all blogs are Cool as a result of Hypertext itself being a fundamentally Cool medium, I believe the ways in which both my blog and blogging in general have developed are inextricably tied to the cultural face of Cool that Rice would prefer we ignore. The history of blogging journalism Graves presents rings eerily true when I consider my own experience creating a blog, which started with a simple blogging template. Such templates, Graves notes, "make it easy to quote from outside sources, setting off the quoted text from the body of the blog and providing a link for those who want to see the original document" (2007: 342). He goes on to note, however, that the existence of such features is not in and of itself significant – blogging tools merely simplify common features that can be found on almost any webpage. What is significant, however, is that "blogging software was expressly designed to emphasize those features to facilitate an activity that was already beginning to take place" (Graves 2007: 343). Before I began posting videos on my blog, I was watching videos online and showing them to anyone who visited my apartment; before I was installing the My Favorite Music application on Facebook, I was making mix tapes to entertain friends and impress women. The affordances of blogging do not simply allow some actions and prevent others. The development (dare I say evolution?) of New Media tools is a product of both technical innovation and individual (dare I say consumer?) demand. If my blog postings consist of videos I didn't record and songs I didn't write, this is due in large part to the affordances of my blogging template – which, in turn, was designed to give people like me what we want: the tools with which to share videos and songs.

Caring is Creepy: The Birth of the (New) Cool

If a theory of technological affordance begins to explain how New Media tools must inevitably develop in tandem with cultural mores and tastes, then connecting this theory to both Rice and Liu's models of Cool may help to explain the symbiotic relationship between Internet tools and bricoleur Cool. That is, to explain why certain forms of pastiche and bricolage not only come to dominate online content production, but also why it is that contemporary Cool can be found in spaces that resist more traditional understandings of Coolness. One particular avenue worth exploring is the way in which genres have developed within Internet content. For example, Graves builds on an older foundation of affordance theory in order to interpret new genre developments in the worlds of both blogging and journalism, arguing that since "technology and sociocultural practice evolve together, each feeding back into the other, to constitute a genre, " within New Media practice we can see how genre becomes "part of the mechanism of emergence, giving expression to features and norms that a developing technology has just made possible – or perhaps is just on the cusp of making possible" (2007: 343). In this way, the existence of digital bricoleurs (including those who work for Adbusters) may be more than just the inevitable outcome of 1990s pastiche culture going online. Although the affordances of blogging derive in part from the aesthetics of sampling, the 'pull' exerted by blogging's affordances can also be productive, allowing for the emergence of new genres of online activity. New Media technologies exert this type of pull in various manners; they succeed or fail, argues Graves, "because particular genres of communication provide a crucible for technological possibility and social intent to evolve together" (2007: 345). In the case of blogging, it would therefore follow that particular genres of blogging develop according to the affordances of blogging software, and these genres in turn serve to define the next iterations of the software.

The degree to which particular genres play a pivotal role in the creation and maintenance of New Media Cool, however, brings us right back to the question of form; if particular cultural practices help technological affordances exercise their pull toward new genres, then the broader Coolness of pastiche and bricolage themselves appear somewhat incontestable. Have we simply traded the innate Coolness of Hypertext for an innate Coolness in sampling? In order to free ourselves from this tangled mess, it is worth returning to the now thoroughly exhausted exemplar of Adbusters magazine. Where traditional models of Cool embrace the anti-corporate rebellion of the Adbusters project, and where Rice sees Cool in the glossy pastiche itself, there remains another possibility: maybe Adbusters is perhaps Cool because of the particular way it manages to combine pastiche with rebellion. I am particularly drawn to this idea that neither the aesthetics nor the practice of sampling are, in and of them selves, innately Cool. This would suggest that Coolness operates through a set of relationships, and not simply through particular forms of content. In her critique of Adbusters and its project, Specht advances a similar argument, noting that while the magazine takes aim at the 'evils' of mainstream corporate Cool, Adbusters as whole fails to critically engage with the cultural logic underpinning such Cool. Instead, it offers its own particular brand of Cool, its own recognizable logo, its own ethos of rebellious chic. As Specht writes of Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn, "[his] strategy to beat the corporations at their own game […] ignores the consequences of winning such a game" (2006: 603). The Coolness of particular Adbusters images (which Rice sees as fundamentally Cool) is ultimately undone by an overt agenda that cannot escape that which it makes its very target. Specht's critique therefore brings form and content into some type of uneasy alignment, wherein the ideological or aesthetic failure of one serves to undermine the other.

What I find particularly compelling in Specht's analysis of Adbusters, and what ultimately allows me to apply such analysis across the New Media spectrum, is her theoretical framework that draws upon both Fredric Jameson and, to my wondrous surprise, Jeff Rice. Citing Rice's essay entitled "What is Cool?: Notes on Intellectualism, Popular Culture, and Writing" (2002), she argues that pastiche and bricolage are only Cool when they operate in particular ways. "To construct cool discourse," writes Rice, "sampling must be mixed. Otherwise, the commutative moments remain distinct and isolated; they continue to function as cultural markers with no evident substance" (qtd. in Specht 2006: 607). Specht takes up this position, arguing that Adbusters and other producers of online Cool must remember, "juxtaposition alone is not enough. There must be a forum or process of mixing that allows the pieces to be combined in a new way, to be seen in a new light" (2006: 607). This critique of Adbusters-style opposition to mainstream media cool argues that simply combining glossy magazine images with anti-corporate slogans fails to escape the aesthetic and political boundaries inherent to the system being spoofed. Just as importantly, however, is that such opposition fails the Coolness test, as it too closely resembles the slick mainstream advertising it hopes to undermine. More successful examples of meaningful pastiche/bricolage, Specht argues, might include such texts as Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, or Found magazine. Whereas Adbusters employs an aesthetic of sampling built on "cultural markers with no evident substance," Found revels in its markers' definitive lack of substance, in order to construct a unified whole that is decidedly postmodern, detached, and Cool. Such a distinction may seem rather minor when one simply considers both magazines as New Media creations, but if Cool is to maintain any kind of subversive, political substance, minor distinctions matter a great deal. Invoking a tradition of postmodern theory in her critique of the Adbusters project, Specht notes that Jameson is well known for condemning the "multiplying heterogeneity in late capitalism as flaccid pastiche rather than parody, as mimicry lacking the sting of satire" (2006: 608). If cultural producers such as Adbusters are to reinvigorate themselves with the 'sting of satire', they could begin by asking a simple question: Is it our design or our politics that makes us Cool, or the interplay of the two?

New Media Reflections: How Pastiche Got Its Groove Back

Above, I have attempted to articulate an understanding of Cool that takes into account both the aesthetics of sampling that permeate Western popular culture and the particularities of contemporary New Media technologies. While the Coolness of Hypertext and its various applications intrigue me, I continue to resist any attempt to make such Coolness innate to technologies themselves. For a project such as Rice's, the significant cognitive re-mappings of Hypertext are certainly worth attention; imagining non-linear, non-narrative modes of writing, engendered and encouraged to proliferate through particular New Media tools, is both exciting and markedly distinct from traditional paradigms of writing. However, in order to appreciate how these same New Media tools can function in both Cool and unCool spaces, a different approach is needed. For this reason, I remain compelled by the model of Cool that emerges from Liu's work around Knowledge Workers. Rather than exploring the pedagogical, psychological, transformative properties of individual Internet applications, Liu chooses to focus on the cultural markers of Cool as they interact with the technological and economic discourses of contemporary economic practice. This framework leads to the conclusion that Cool must function through both form and content if it is to serve its purpose. "Whether it is expressed as appropriation, sampling, defacement, or hacking," argues Liu, the Coolest cultural artefacts of the Internet Age will involve "acts of destruction against what is most valued in knowledge work – the content, form, or control of information;" the 'strongest' art, therefore, "will be about the 'destruction of destruction' or, put another way, the recognition of the destructiveness in creation" (2004: 8-9). Although this may seem devoid of any real hopefulness, where Rice and others see postmodern ennui and despair, we must remember that the "destruction of destruction" can ultimately be a productive exercise. Although cultural producers such as Adbusters may see themselves as engaged in political and aesthetic acts of destruction, Coolness derives from an informed process of building. The digital bricoleur, then, and not the activist, the PhotoShop guru, or the chic nihilist, stands to be the Coolest figure of the early 21^st Century. The days of the blogger are upon us; if you're Cool enough, I'll see you online.

References:

De Kerckhove, D. & Dewdney, C. (1995). The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality. Toronto: Somerville House Pub.

Ewen, S. (1988). All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture. York: Basic Books.

Frank, T. (1997). The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gaver, W. (1991). "Technology Affordances." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Reaching Through Technology. New York: ACM Press. pp. 79-84.

Goldman R., & Papson, S. (1996). Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising. New York: Guilford Press.

Graves, L. (2007). "The Affordances of Blogging: A Case Study in Culture and Technological Effects." Journal of Communication Inquiry, 31(4), 331-346.

Lanham, R. A. (1993). The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Liu, A. (2004). The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Papson, S., Goldman, R. & Kersey, N. (2004). "Web Site Design: Hypertext Aesthetics and Visual Sociology." American Behavioral Scientist, 47(12), 1617-1643.

Rice, J. (2007). The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Specht, M. H. (2006). "The Emerging Critical Power of Cool." Michigan Quarterly Review, 45(4), 598-609.