Web 2.0
"Web 2.0 is all the Web sites out there that get their value from the actions of users." (http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/09/finally_a_defin.html)
Definition
Web 2.0 is best defined by a combination of the following three characteristics:
1)the value is created by the users
2) it is the collection of tools that makes this possible
3) it is the business model that funds the platforms that enable sharing, i.e. centralized and privately owned platforms
More technically, Web 2.0 is often used for sites 1) which atttempt to make the data independent from the person producing them, so that they can be used freely by others; 2) to make the web programmable, so that less and less software is used in the PC, but the intelligence is located in the network; 3) to socialise webpages through collective intelligence, social software, and networking.
Characteristics
According to Dion Hinchcliffe in the Wall Street Journal
URL = http://web2.wsj2.com/the_state_of_web_20.htm
- The Web and all its connected devices as one global platform of reusable services and data
- Data consumption and remixing from all sources, particularly user generated data
- Continuous and seamless update of software and data, often very rapidly
- Rich and interactive user interfaces
- Architecture of participation that encourages user contribution
Discussion
Political Critique of the Web 2.0 Wisdom of Crowds paradigm
Marc Fawzi, has a detailed argument, see the Unwisdom of Crowds.
Here, he compares the Web 2.0 characteristics to those of the hunter-gatherer mode, and concludes that it is therefore regressive:
"Web 2.0: Back to the Hunter-Gatherer Society
Observe: trusted individuals are once again the source of news in a society (i.e. bloggers)
Observe: word of mouth is once again how news spreads (i.e. viral marketing)
Observe: people once again hunt and gather in a crowd (e.g. digg)
Observe: people once again group things using words like small, big, happy, sad, funny, food rather than detailed hierarchical structures (i.e. tags)
Observe: impulsive production (minimal upfront planning vs. a lot of upfront planning) is back in style (e.g. Google “betas")
Observe: once again, sharing between people cannot be explained with the strict concept of economic reciprocity and is being explained by the egalitarian and optimistic notion that what is good for all is good for one (YouTube, del.icio.us, etc.)
These are all traits of a hunter-gatherer society, i.e. a pre-agricultural society.
The interesting thing is that human behavior and society had evolved for a reason. It may be that the Internet is simply freeing the hunter gatherer inside us, but I wonder if bringing out an ancient ingrained behavior will upset the equilibrium that was achieved through tens of thousands of years of behavioral adaptation. I realize that the last statement sounds like the plot for Jurassic Park (the “hunter gatherer" in us as the suddenly reborn dinosaur ready to wreck havoc on modern-day socio-economic structures), but it’s a plausible suggestion given that the Web has already had a great disruptive effect on some industries, e.g. newspapers and soon the media hierarchy at large. Speaking of the media hierarchy, a hunter gatherer society is by definition incapable of supporting the concept of a formal, non-arbitrary social, economic or political hierarchy.
But is going back to a society with no formally defined social, economic and political hierarchies a good thing or a bad thing?
I content that it’s a bad thing and that Web 2.0 has got it all wrong by throwing away tens of thousands of years of adaptation and evolution of human society (on the behavioral and structural levels.)
This regression is being covered up by the false notion of the ‘wisdom of crowds.’" (http://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com/2006/07/07/web-25-from-hunter-gatherer-to-democratic-society/)
Web 2.0 and capitalist appropriation
A critique of the Web 2.0 paradigm of the centralisation of sharing at Metamute magazine. By Dmytri Kleiner et al. at http://www.metamute.org/en/InfoEnclosure-2.0:
"If Web 2.0 means anything at all, its meaning lies in the rationale of venture capital. Web 2.0 represents the return of investment in internet startups. After the dotcom bust (the real end of Web 1.0) those wooing investment dollars needed a new rationale for investing in online ventures. ‘Build it and they will come’, the dominant attitude of the ’90s dotcom boom, along with the delusional ‘new economy’, was no longer attractive after so many online ventures failed. Building infrastructure and financing real capitalisation was no longer what investors were looking for. Capturing value created by others, however, proved to be a more attractive proposition.
Web 2.0 is Internet Investment Boom 2.0. Web 2.0 is a business model, it means private capture of community-created value. No one denies that the techology of sites like YouTube, for instance, is trivial. This is more than evidenced by the large number of identical services such as DailyMotion. The real value of YouTube is not created by the developers of the site, but rather it is created by the people who upload videos to the site. Yet, when YouTube was bought for over a billion dollars worth of Google stock, how much of this stock was acquired by those that made all these videos? Zero. Zilch. Nada. Great deal if you are an owner of a Web 2.0 company.
The value produced by users of Web 2.0 services such as YouTube is captured by capitalist investors. In some cases, the actual content they contribute winds up the property of site owners. Private appropriation of community created value is a betrayal of the promise of sharing technology and free cooperation.
Unlike Web 1.0, where investors often financed expensive capital acquisition, software development and content creation, a Web 2.0 investor mainly needs to finance hype-generation, marketing and buzz. The infrastructure is widely available for cheap, the content is free and cost of the software, at least that much of it that is not also free, is negligible. Basically, by providing some bandwidth and disk space, you are able to become a successful internet site if you can market yourself effectively.
The principal success of a Web 2.0 company comes from its relationship to the community, more specifically, the ability of the company to ‘harness collective intelligence’, as O’Reilly puts it. Web 1.0 companies were too monolithic and unilateral in their approach to content. Success stories of the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 were based on the ability for a company to remain monolithic in its brand of content, or better yet, its outright ownership of that content, while opening up the method of that content’s creation to the community. Yahoo! Created a portal to community content while it remained the centralised location to find that content. EBay allows the community to sell its goods while owning the marketplace for those goods. Amazon, selling the same products as many other sites, succeeded by allowing the community to participate in the ‘flow’ around their products.
Because the capitalists who invest in Web 2.0 startups do not often fund early capitalisation, their behaviour is markedly more parasitic as well. They often arrive late in the game when value creation already has good momentum, swoop in to take ownership and use their financial power to promote the service, often within the context of a hegemonic network of major, well financed partners. This means that companies that are not acquired by venture capital end up cash starved and squeezed out of the club.
In all these cases, the value of the internet site is created not by the paid staff of the company that runs it, but by the users who use it. With all of the emphasis on community created content and sharing, it’s easy to overlook the other side of the Web 2.0 experience: ownership of all this content and ability to monetise its value. To the user, this doesn’t come up that often, it’s only part of the fine print in their MySpace Terms of Service agreement, or it’s the Flickr.com in the url of their photos. It doesn’t usually seem like an issue to the community, it’s a small price to pay for the use of these wonderful applications and for the impressive effect on search engine results when one queries one’s own name. Since most users do not have access to alternative means to produce and publish their own content, they are attracted to sites like MySpace and Flickr." (http://www.metamute.org/en/InfoEnclosure-2.0)
Web 2.0 as a pre-emptive strike against P2P systems
(I question this argument, since P2P systems continue to evolve, and are being used by entrepreneurial ventures as well - MB)
From Metamute. By Dmytri Kleiner et al at
http://www.metamute.org/en/InfoEnclosure-2.0:
"From a technological stand point, distributed and peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies are far more efficient than Web 2.0 systems. Making better use of network resources by using the computers and network connections of users, P2P avoids creating bottlenecks created by centralised systems and allows content to be published with less infrastructure, often no more than a computer and a consumer internet connection. P2P systems do not require the massive data centres of sites such as YouTube. The lack of central infrastructure also comes with a lack of central control, meaning that censorship, often a problem with privately-owned ‘communities’ that frequently bend to private and public pressure groups and enforce limitations on the the kinds of content they allow. Also, the lack of large central cross-referencing databases of user information has a strong advantage in terms of privacy.
From this perspective, it can be said that Web 2.0 is capitalism’s preemptive attack against P2P systems. Despite their many disadvantages in comparison to these, Web 2.0 is more attractive to investors, and thus has more money to fund and promote centralised solutions. The end result of this is that capitalist investment flowed into centralised solutions making them easy and cheap or free for non-technical information producers to adopt. Thus, this ease of access compared to the more technically challenging and expensive undertaking of owning your own means of information production created a ‘landless’ information proletariat ready to provide alienated content-creating labour for the the new info-landlords of Web 2.0.
The mission of Web 2.0 is to destroy the P2P aspect of the internet. To make you, your computer, and your internet connection dependent on connecting to a centralised service that controls your ability to communicate. Web 2.0 is the ruin of free, peer-to-peer systems and the return of monolithic ‘online services’. A telling detail here is that most home or office internet connections in the ’90s, modem and ISDN connections, were synchronous – equal in their ability to send and receive data. By design, your connection enabled you to be equally a producer and a consumer of information. On the other hand, modern DSL and cable-modem connections are asynchronous, allowing you to download information quickly, but upload slowly. Not to mention the fact that many user agreements for internet service forbid you to run servers on your consumer circuit, and may cut off your service if you do.
Capitalism, rooted in the idea of earning income by way of idle share ownership, requires centralised control, without which peer producers have no reason to share their income with outside shareholders. Capitalism, therefore, is incompatible with free P2P networks, and thus, so long as the financing of internet development comes from private shareholders looking to capture value by owning internet resources, the network will only become more restricted and centralised.
It should be noted that even in the case of commons-based peer production, so long as the commons and membership in the peer group is limited, and inputs such as food for the producers and the computers that they use are acquired from outside the commons-based peer group, then the peer producers themselves may be complicit in the exploitative capturing of this labour value. Thus in order to really address the unjust capture of alienated labour value, access to the commons and membership in the peer group must be extended as far as possible toward the inclusion of a total system of goods and services. Only when all productive goods are available from commons-based producers can all producers retain the value of the product of their labour.
And while the information commons may have the possibility of playing a role in moving society toward more inclusive modes of production, any real hope for a genuine, community enriching, next generation of internet-based services is not rooted in creating privately owned, centralised resources, but rather in creating cooperative, P2P and commons-based systems, owned by everybody and nobody. Although small and obscure by today’s standards, with it’s focus on peer-to-peer applications such as Usenet and email, the early internet was very much a common, shared resource. Along with the commercialisation of the internet and the emergence of capitalist financing comes the enclosure of this information commons, translating public wealth into private profit. Thus Web 2.0 is not to be thought of as a second-generation of either the technical or social development of the internet, but rather as the second wave of capitalist enclosure of the Information Commons.
Virtually all of the most used internet resources could be replaced by P2P alternatives. Google could be replaced by a P2P search system, where every browser and every webserver were active nodes in the search process; Flickr and YouTube could also be replaced by PeerCast and eDonkey type applications, which allow users to use their own computers and internet connections to collaboratively share their pictures and videos. However, developing internet resources requires the application of wealth, and so long as the source of this wealth is finance capital, the great peer-to-peer potential of the internet will remain unrealised." (http://www.metamute.org/en/InfoEnclosure-2.0)
More Information
Here's a good overview of tools already, at http://www.shambles.net/web2/
Graphic Representations
1. By Tim O'Reilly
URL = http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/meme-map.jpg
2. By Dion Hinchcliffe
