Social media allows people to interact with each other on the Internet using Web applications, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Second Life. With social media, people can create, reuse, and exchange user-generated content—photos, videos, reviews, or articles—on sites such as Instagram, YouTube, Trip Advisor, and Wikipedia.

Social media is deployed on many types of hardware devices, which vary according to screen size, user interface, and degree of mobility (desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc.). User preference and constraints imposed by work situations suggest an optimal or possible device for a certain task. Web 2.0 provides the software foundation or platform for social media. Web 2.0 thus enables readers to be writers, or prosumers, a term coined by Alvin Toffler.

In using a new generation of technology to support ...