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Drift
Reality > Washington,
DC > Putting Web 2.0 in Perspective
At
a recent conference, I overheard one communications professional
ask another, “What is our Web 2.0 strategy?”
I
wondered what exactly they meant by a Web 2.0 strategy, despite
my background and experience with the Web and new media, and,
soon after, decided to register for the official Web 2.0 conference,
set to take place November 7-9 in San Francisco to learn more.
I visited the conference Web site and found a quote from Ross
Mayfield, “Web 1.0 was commerce. Web 2.0 is people,”
as well as an impressive guest roster featuring a mix of voices
from both traditional and new media firms. However, when I went
to sign up, the $3,000 event was sold out. I then began to search
for a comparable event and stumbled upon the Web site for ‘Web
2point1,’ where I learned that the non-profit organization
running the site had chosen that particular moniker after being
threatened with legal action by O’Reilly Media (who coined
the term Web 2.0) and CMP.
I
couldn’t help but note the irony that the Web 2.0 conference
was cost-prohibitive to most ordinary folks, and that a non-profit
had been sued by the organizers of the Web 2.0 conference for
attempting to use the same name. After all, isn’t Web 2.0
supposed to be about participatory media and collaborative development?
Isn’t it about people?
What
exactly is Web 2.0, and will it replace what we now know as the
Web and the way in which we all communicate, as many seem to claim?
It
may very well be true that in three thousand years, historians
will view the development and widespread adoption of the Internet
as a landmark event in the history of human communications, but
whether that development will be responsible for providing a 'new
mind for an old species' (see below) is not only questionable
thinking, it is dangerous. The problem with the rhetoric of technological
revolutions is that it loudly proclaims, as if in glowing neon
letters, that this era is something new; the past is no more;
and that the technological innovation will usher us into a utopian
era. What typically follows is that, unwittingly, we find ourselves
repeating the same patterns of behavior, waiting for the next
revolutionary technology to come around and change the world.
Consider
the following:
In
the summer of 2005, Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor
of Wired magazine, wrote that hyperlink technology was unleashing
a new era of communicative participation "found nowhere else
on the planet or in history." In fact, he heralded the present
media landscape as the start of a revolutionary era in human social
interactions:
Three
thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I
believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third
millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly
coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert
objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into
a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing.
This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most
surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass
and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all
processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From
this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface
for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power
that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a
new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new
mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.
-- Kelly (2005)
Kelly's
prophetic proclamation reminded me of another passage I had recently
read in Scientific American that hailed a "new organization
of society:"
A
state of things in which every individual, however secluded,
will have at call every other individual in the community, to
the saving of no end of social and business complications, of
needless goings to and fro, of disappointments, delays, and
a countless host of those great and little evils and annoyances
which go so far under present conditions to make life laborious
and unsatisfactory.
--
1880 Scientific American (cited in Marvin, 1998)
Interestingly,
more than 100 years separates these respective pennings. The Scientific
American article was published on February 14, 1880 and focused
on the telephone’s impact on society. And today, the notion
that the telephone has helped make the machinations of modern
life possible is not in question. On the contrary, however, the
idea that the telephone has had a revolutionary effect on society,
eliminating the 'evils and annoyances' that make our life 'laborious
and unsatisfactory' is, in fact, in question. When I read this
passage from Scientific American, I couldn’t help but wonder
how the wide-eyed journalist who had written the article might
have felt if he suddenly found himself bombarded by telemarketers
all day? Did Kelly consider how Al Qaeda used the “collaborative
interface for our civilization” to access information on
the structural design of the World Trade Center (Booth & Dunn
2002) and, additionally, to plan the attack? (US Institute of
Peace, 2004)?
Yes,
technology changes our lives, but it does not replace or necessarily
improve what’s been used in the past, nor does it become
part of everyday life without other factors playing a significant
role.
Next:
Defining Web 2.0 |
