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Like most people, I know exactly how to be a lawyer, because I’ve seen them do their stuff on television any number of times. And so here is my Perry Mason Moment. To the question I suggested in passing last time – “Whither Web 2.0? – I reply “Objection, Your Honor. Assumes facts not in evidence.”

What is Web 2.0, after all? Was there at some point in recent time a technological innovation that rendered the Internet an entirely different entity from what it had been before? No, I don’t think so. No more so than when the makers of Gleem toothpaste announced one day in the 1950s that it was now a new and better Gleem owing to the addition of secret ingredient GL-70. For much the same reasons, one day in the early 2000s the technology marketing whiz Tim O’Reilly announced that the Web was now new and better and should be called Web 2.0. Well, OK, Tim, if you say so. 

The labels that marketers and journalists tack onto things are often convenient shorthand for complexes of ideas, feelings, events, and memories. But often they mislead us by making it seem that everything under the label has been thoroughly examined and the label itself thoughtfully created and applied. Remember the ’60s? Or if not, you’ve heard of them? When did the ’60s start? If things like the civil rights movement are foremost in your thinking, you may well wish to think of the ’60s as having begun in 1955 with Rosa Parks, or maybe 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education. If you mainly associate the ’60s with the Vietnam War, maybe they don’t really get going until about 1965. If music is your focus, maybe the British Invasion of 1963? Or the beginning of psychedelia in 1966? And when did the ’60s end? Who can say? 

The point is that the label “the ’60s” certainly does not simply designate the ten-year span 1960-69, and that what it does designate depends to a great deal on who is thinking about it and why. Likewise with a label like “Web 2.0.” The more I try to think about it, the less I see. Maybe I’m blind to it, but I don’t think so. 

I mentioned last time the “project of building a genuine civilization.” It’s not an unconsidered phrase. As I write this, some astronauts circling the Earth in a space station have apparently succeeded in repairing their computers; meanwhile, no doubt, in South America and New Guinea and perhaps one or two other regions of the home planet, equally human beings are feasting on grubs and wondering about these occasional strangers who cover their bodies and try to capture’s one’s soul in little black boxes that go “click.” That gulf disturbs me. Moreover, it’s not obvious to me that the gulf in our own home culture between the best educated and the worst is qualitatively different. There’s a lot of work to be done. 

Most people seem to behave most of the time as though they are confident that someone else is in charge. We don’t feel, moment to moment or day to day, that we ourselves are carrying any responsibility for the state of the world. And, realistically, we aren’t, most of us, for there’s little we can do about it, moment to moment or day to day. And yet, if Western ideals mean anything, especially the ones about liberty and democracy and consent of the governed and all that sort of thing, then we are responsible. How are we to make good on that? How especially if we are by and large ignorant of what has gone before – what has worked, what has not, how we got to the present circumstance – and of the tools that have produced what is demonstrably good? 

Mortimer Adler, whose Paideia project I described last time, was par excellence what many today delight to sneer at as an elitist, yet he was a more thoroughgoing democrat than they, for he believed in the real educability of everyone. The thing he held in highest regard on Earth he strove lifelong to share. Please read that sentence again. This is my answer to those who gabble about the supposed “gatekeepers” of traditional learning and publishing, and who celebrate the supposed democratization of information without regard to the essential emptiness of mere information. 

As it happens, my day job involves looking at a lot of websites, especially ones that you would prefer not to see. Maybe this has warped my judgment. There’s some pretty awful stuff out there, put there by fellow human beings. They do it for profit, or they do it for the sheer joy of being naughty. The number of porn sites on the Web – and these aren’t the worst of what’s out there – runs well into the millions. Millions! 

I was a great enthusiast of the Web when I first learned of it, and I still use it daily, apart from the job. But my hopes have dimmed somewhat in fifteen years, and I’m pretty resistant to any more hype on this subject. So far, that’s all I see in Web 2.0.

200e



Posted in Society, Technology, Education, Popular Culture, Web 2.0 Forum
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13 Responses to “Web 2.0: Hope or Hype?”

  1. Seth Finkelstein Says:

    0) “Hype”. That was easy.

    1) “Web 2.0″ refers to the capabilities of the Internet now making it profitable to build a business out of data-mining and/or digital-sharecropping. There was indeed a point where server and bandwidth costs became cheap enough to make this feasible, as there was a point previously decades ago that physical travel became cheap enough to support mail-order businesses.

    The problem is that it created a business model of making a million dollars by fleecing a million chumps of a dollar each. Which requires somehow getting all those suckers to play the evangelist’s game. Hence the horrible hype-machine devoted to grifting the rubes, promoting that working for free is just the most fun and self-empowering thing imaginable, because it’s all about YOU-YES-YOU! (ka-ching)

    This is a driving force also behind the demagoguery and pseudo-populism, where a bunch of establishment insiders posture as rebel outsiders. See talk-radio for this tactic of right-wing millionaire “entertainers” posing as speakers for The Common Man.

    2) Excellent academic research has established that the number of porn sites on the web is somewhere between 1% to 2%. ONE TO TWO PERCENT. This has been found repeatedly over different times by different researchers. See the notes at
    http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001097.html

    I realize the demographic being catered to here is conservative middle-aged or older men. But really, isn’t it absurd to be decrying “OH MY GOD THERE’S *S*-*E*-*X* ON THE WEB!”. Especially from people who should know all about, e.g. pornographic friezes at Pompeii?

  2. Bob McHenry Says:

    I don’t know how the 1-2% figure was arrived at. I do know that the database I work with contains just a hair under 4 million URLs classified as pornographic. (This includes not only commercial sites devoted to the stuff but also other sites that include, for whatever reason, some pornographic matter.) This would suggest a total Web-verse of 200-400 million URLs. Not impossible, I suppose, but that seems high. (By URL is meant, in this context, the lowest-level URL that comprises all the relevant matter in a given domain or subdomain. More or less.)

    Still, a great many of those 400 million sites/pages are behind firewalls or otherwise made difficult to find. With porn, the reverse is true; it’s hard to avoid. Of the heavily traveled regions of the Web, it’s much more prevalent.

  3. Seth Finkelstein Says:

    Well, through the wonders of the Internet, you could read the material linked in my post above. The Internet is good for something besides porn, sometimes.

    Err, if you think “200-400 million” “seems high”, search engines regularly talk about their index in the BILLIONS. Some of that is of course duplication and spam, but we don’t know how much of the number you cite is duplication and spam - especially (and this is a very sore point with me) because the most expert investigation is hindered by the threat of being sued for decrypting the secret blacklists.

    While I agree with you about many problems with Wikipedia, I think hype like the above shows there is something also to complaint about fogeyness or that traditional interests are not so intellectually pure themselves.

    2408
  4. Martijn Kriens Says:

    When you talk about the sixties you sort of contradict yourself I think. The exact date it started is less important than the fact that in some timeframe around the 60’s a lot of change has happened. You mention them yourself and they all circle around a big break with the past and the rise of the culture of the youth (then).

    Could it not be the same now? Of course there will never be a precise moment for social change. social change is a gradual process where some people start and others follow. To me web 2.0 is about the change that all are able to communicaties with all, like in this forum, on hyves etc. Some of it works and some doesnt.

  5. Laura Gibbs Says:

    This is a very negative post, and I’m not sure why the gloom - I agree with Adler’s motto, and web2.0 tools are exactly about SHARING, giving students and teachers the option to not just learn in isolation, but to learn together as part of a global conversation. For example, last night I published at my website a javascript widget (very web2.0) which I will be using in my own teaching - it’s a “Roman Emperor of the Week” widget. Well, this morning I got a lovely email from a Latin teacher in Catalonia who has already added my widget to his webpage, along with some other widgets from my collection at http://SchoolhouseWidgets.com. As a teacher, I’ve found that the Internet is the best method for sharing teaching materials, far preferable to traditional print publication for the kinds of materials I create. The advent of web2.0 tools (widgets, tagging, RSS, etc.) has added even more possibilities for making connections and sharing online. I’m sure Mortimer Adler could have made great use of all of them in his sharing quest.

  6. eliot bates Says:

    There has been a shift in scope, from largely single-authored or small group-authored websites to large scale collaborative projects such as wikipedia (and related entities) citizendium, and before them dmoz (the open directory project). Multi-user forums have sprung up on thousands of topics. Additionally, there was a profound shift from chat rooms (which, ironically, had very little sense of being a “room” or a “place”) to social networking sites, the later characterized by their indelibility, searchability, and multimedia nature. All share a similar conglomeration of the work of thousands of individuals, though geared towards different purposes.

    On many topics, I would say that forums and wikipedia entries truly rival any academic work on the same topic. Let’s take a musical instrument that I perform - an instrument whose history goes back to the 6th century A.D. - which barely exists in the academic literature (I have spent 12 years scouring the scant mentions and gross inaccuracies that comprise “the literature” on the subject, at American and Turkish libraries and private archives). A huge amount of accurate knowledge is available on Mike’s Oud Forums (in text, image, sound, and video formats). It’s a forum, run by a guy named Mike who likes ouds. But it’s attracted several of the most prominent performers, several of the best makers, and many non-tenured but very persistent multilingual amateur researchers who have amassed incredible historical and contemporary information/knowledge. If I want to know something about the oud, there is really only one place to go, and it isn’t a book or a library (though some books may come from the forum project).

    That, for me, is the potential of the web (web 2.0, or perhaps 1.5?) actualized, where passionate and diligent individuals collaborate and create great works of a scope and nature that was not possible before.

  7. The Interactive » Clay Shirky vs Michael Gorman: heavyweights fight a battle of ideas Says:

    […] Sven Birkerts - The Threat to Individuality Roger Kimball - Technology, Temptation and Virtual Reality Danah Boyd - Knowledge Access as a Public Good Robert McHenry - Web 2.0: Hope or Hype […]

  8. Stephen Downes Says:

    If this is the authorities speaking, bring on the amateurs.

    I mean, really. What sort of understanding of Web 2.0 is this column intended to represent?

    Perhaps the understanding represented in the Britannica article? “In particular, many of the most vocal advocates of the Web 2.0 concept have an almost messianic view of harnessing social networking for business goals.”

    Um…. what?

    The article reviews Web 2.0 without managing to touch on any of its essential features, things such as AJAX, APIs and REST. Neither does it manage to address things like tagging and folksonomy. And it barely mentions things like social networking, user generated content and the wisdom of crowds.

    Perhaps if McHenry had some idea *what* he was looking for he would be in a position to talk about it. Instead we get a criticism so generic it can be applied to things as diverse as Gleem and the 60s.

    If that were all, I would have just left this. But we are treated in addition to an offensive and ignorant stereotyping of people in South America and New Guinea. Perhaps McHenry is relying on Britannica’s 1890 edition for information about the dark continents.

    And we are finally treated to pseudo-sociology. “Most people seem to behave most of the time as though they are confident that someone else is in charge.”

    I would like to see the study that supports this (of course there is none; he made it up).

    It is likely that they think someone else is in charge, because - empirically - someone else *is* in charge. Very few of us are Prime Ministers or CEOs, which means that very few of us are actually in charge.

    Whether they have confidence in those people is a different matter. Mostly these people are not interested so much in leading us as in looting us.

    I sincerely doubt that Adler was “a more thoroughgoing democrat” than I, or at least, this argument fails completely to convince me of that.

    I am one of those who “gabble” about the gatekeepers. I rail against them precisely because I believe everybody is educable. But where I differ is, by ‘educable’ I do not mean ‘can be like Adler’. I believe people can choose their own way and their own culture, without having some self-proclaimed experts telling them what is literature and what is crap.

    Which returns us to Web 2.0.

    On the basis of, well, nothing, McHenry has decided that Web 2.0 belongs to the category of ‘crap’ rather than ‘literature’.

    As though - what? Literature could only be produced through things that are not Web 2.0? That literature could only be produced by the elite, not the “educable” masses?

    McHenry huffs about “Western ideals… especially the ones about liberty and democracy and consent of the governed and all that sort of thing.”

    If Web 2.0 is genuinely a means of allowing the “educable” masses to express themselves, or even to govern themselves, then it is the *instantiation* of those ideals. Hardly the antithesis.

    I think that McHenry would quiver in terror at the thought of those “educable” masses actually seizing the reins of power without first being subject to an appropriate indoctrination program.

    For otherwise, he might face the terrible prospect of being governed by people with a current and detailed knowledge of culture, technology, politics, law and sociology (ie.: who’s on “American Idol,” what’s the deal with the iPhone, will Fred Thompson declare, should Scooter Libby be pardoned, and, yes, whither Web 2.0).

    The horror! The horror!

    1fa1
  9. links for 2007-08-30 « tilt! Says:

    […] Web 2.0: Hope or Hype? -Britannica Blog (tags: Web2.0 social.software)   […]

  10. » The Social Web (Web 2.0: What went wrong?) - Paolo blog: Ramblings on Trust, Reputation, Recommender Systems, Social Software, Free Software, ICT4D and much more Says:

    […] […]

  11. The Social Web Says:

    […] Mchenry, Robert. “Web 2.0: Hope or Hype? - Britannica Blog.” Britannica Blog. 25 Jun 2007.  9 Jul 2007 <http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/2007/06/web-20-hope-or-hype/>. […]

  12. Pete Says:

    My two cents worth.

    Take a look at something like !SMACK! and you will realize that Web2.0 can really bring things alive. It’s in the experience, I think that it makes sense not that analysis.

    smackbiz.biz/smack

    Pete

  13. William Hill Says:

    Health 2.0 is derived from the term Web 2.0, which implies a 2nd generation/release of the Internet.

    The ‘2.0′ part was established within computer programming - as a new edition of a an application is released, it is common practice for the programmers to add an incrementing number at the end of a program’s name, to label the new version.

    Web 2.0 implies the ‘2nd release’ of the Internet, which of course is not based on anything concrete. The Internet being made up of millions upon millions of interconnecting computers running lots of various programs, but is more of a concept to describe the type of programs/applications/functionality one can now locate on the Internet.

    The Internet was initially complied of mainly static pages of data. Soon to follow was email, web forums and chat rooms where discussions could take place. Web 2.0 refers to a trend on the Internet that saw a step forward in the way users conduct communicate over the Internet, which includes the use of blogs, videos, podcasts, wikis and online communities where people with common interests get together to share ideas, media, code and all types of information.

    Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking, blogs, patient communities and online tools for search and self-care management look as though they will permanently alter the healthcare landscape indefinitely.

    As with Web 2.0, there is a lot of debate about the meaning of the term ‘health 2.0′. The Wall Street Journal recently attempted to define Health 2.0 as:

    “The social-networking revolution is coming to health care, at the same time that new Internet technologies and software programs are making it easier than ever for consumers to find timely, personalized health information online. Patients who once connected mainly through email discussion groups and chat rooms are building more sophisticated virtual communities that enable them to share information about treatment and coping and build a personal network of friends. At the same time, traditional Web sites that once offered cumbersome pages of static data are developing blogs, podcasts, and customized search engines to deliver the most relevant and timely information on health topics.”

    While this traditional view of the definition imputes it as the merging of the Web 2.0 phenomenon within healthcare. I personally believe it’s so much more. In my opinion, Health 2.0 goes way beyond just the permeant social networking technology to include a complete renaissance in the way that Healthcare is actually delivered and conveyed.

    Source - www.rxpop.com

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