Web 2.0 Weary?

Web 2.0 came into being around 2005/2006 after the .com collapse of 2004/2005, when the economy seemed betrayed by this new upstart Internet technology. When the business world adopted the web as a legitimate arena for conducting its activity, the Internet gained and lost on many fronts.

Web guru Tim O'Reilly collaborated with web pioneer Dale Dougherty to assess the outcomes of this tumultuous time and emerged with an understanding that the Internet had emerged even more powerful, pervasive, and persuasive than before. They saw a new generation of web-making which they dubbed as Web 2.0, an evolution and revolution that moved web users from a role as consumers to a new role as creative collaborators. They came up with a list of transformations that included these old and new practices.

I am sure that you can think of other practices that have emerged in the past several years. I would add that in the emergence of Web 2.0 consumers were transformed into collaborators. We might agree that Napster has been replaced by podcasting, YouTube, iTunes, and innovative applications continue to mushroom. To my mind, phenomena like MySpace and FaceBook are ushering in Web 3.0 with their emphasis on building communities through structured Wikis.

Now there seems to be yet another value that has emerged, that of group process. Community is emerging as an overriding value, perhaps even overemphasized over individual achievement. Group achievement is superior. In addition, participation is strongly urged. In participating, we leave our mark of having been there. "Being There" is perhaps the most important value emerging. Peter Sellers legacy was his personification of the power of presence in his acting in the film Being There based on Jerzy Kosiński's 1971 novel . Television gives us the illusion of being there, and the Internet conspires in that illusion as we can leave our comments, our web identity, and our avatar persona. Perticipant reviews are often just a few sentences, which as they aggregate become more compelling than the opinion of "experts."

Now when we visit websites, we are always asked to sign in. Our monikers and passwords pile up like mystic monuments to an electronic presencing, a new reality that overrides real people and real places. Maybe that is where we are headed in our evolution. Maybe the new being there is sitting in front of a screen while a new cyberworld endlessly and incessantly unfolds before us as we click to acknowledge that we are there, listening and watching. Now, however, we are also making and sharing our own creations.