Social Media week6
Is There Life After Web 2.0?
last update: March 2009
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

What You Need To Know About This Course
week 1 Histories of the Internet
week 2 Histories of the Internet and World Wide Web
week 3
Social Media, Cyber Clustering, and Social Isolation
week 4 Participation: Benefits, Numbers, and Quality
week 5 Quality. The Wisdom or Ineptitude of the Crowd
The Web 2.0 Ideology
week 7
week 6 Art and Social Media
Spring Break
week 8
Political Net Activism
week 9
What Does It Take To Participate?
Why Participate?
week 10
Got Ethics? Labor, Work, What?
week 11 week 14
The Power of Users
week 13 Net Neutrality
week 12 Near Future Scenarios
week 15
Presentations
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

The Web 2.0 Ideology
week 6
March 2, 4
Required Reading:
Judith Williamson, Consuming Passions (New York: Marion Bryars, 1998). 10-44.
O'Reilly, Tim. \"O'Reilly -- What Is Web 2.0.\" O'Reilly Network -- Developers' Hub. 30 Sep 2005. 9 Jul 2007
<http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html>.
Suggested Reading:
Scharmen, Fred (2006, May). \"You Must Be Logged In To Do That!\" Yale Arch 752b
<http://www.sevensixfive.net/myspace/myspacetwopointoh.html>
Barnes, Susan. \"A privacy paradox: Social networking in the United States.\" First Monday. 1 Jan 2006. 26
Aug 2007 <http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_9/barnes/index.html>.
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

Web 2.0

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

The Web as platform
“the user as contributor”
blogs RSS
Open API’s
collective intelligence
Ajax
Social Networking Sites Mashups
Perpetual beta
wikis
Network effect
folksonomies
exploitation/expropriation of user labor
Web 2.0
image source: http://is.gd/lj8E
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

Web 2.0
“Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected
devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the
intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a
continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it,
consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including
individual users, while providing their own data and services in a
form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects
through an \"architecture of participation,\" and going beyond the
page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.”
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/10/web_20_compact_definition.html
In November 2004, O’Reilly Media applied for a service mark on the use of the
term \"Web 2.0\" for live events. Based on this application, they sent a cease-and-
desist demand to the Irish non-profit organization IT@Cork on May 24, 2006.

A Few Concepts

http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2009/03/what-bruce-ster.html

AUDIO (13 mins)
Tim O'Reilly on Web 2.0
Users add value
An open source activist looks back on the Web 2.0 renaissance
and how Google made money.
He foresees a future of data shadows”
March 2009
http://www.spokenword.org/program/219315
http://www.economist.com/

The Long Tail
“In this model, information technology makes it possible to sell
more goods but this is not just a logistical exercise. It involves
the active fostering of various consumer communities and
their aggregation into critical masses with the result that
commodities that would have had only faint sales records in
the past because of their isolated ‘audience’ come to have
substantive sales records, which, when aggregated with those
of other audiences, produce a substantial new market segment
(Brynjolfsson et al ., 2003).”
\"Reinventing\" Nigel Thrift, 287-288

\"Companies are increasingly likely to ‘free reveal’ in order to
increase incentives to innovate, giving away ownership rights
in order to obtain other benefits.\"
“Reinventing” N. Thrift
“Permanently Beta”
-emphasis on the process of rapid
experimentation rather than a finished product
Services, Not Packaged Product
Blogs, Participation, Comments
Right to Remix

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVDnFYsEPQE&feature=related
Remix

Network Effect
The value of a service to a potential user
depends on the number of people who
use it. The participation of one individual
indirectly benefits others who join.
Exit Impossible?
Cancel AOL account
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmpDSBAh6RY
(audio)
The network effect makes it harder to leave social
networking sites like Facebook.
http://tinyurl.com/dk3xq

Open API’s
Solution to interconnect websites
Doorway through which people with the right “key” can pass
(e.g., allows 3rd party programmers to access Facebook’s/
Google’s databases)
API
In the past, corporate data bases were locked up. http://tinyurl.com/2lqx88

AJAX is a web development technique that makes web pages
feel more responsive by exchanging only small amounts of data
with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page
does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a
change.
\"AJAX with JavaScript binding everything.\"
“JavaScript is the duct tape of the Web.”

The Web 2.0 Ideology
http://tinyurl.com/22qfyj

discuss

Ideology
... comprehensive vision, a way of looking at things
... set of ideas proposed by the dominant class to all
members of society as common sense
The dominant ideology appears as \"neutral,\"
holding to assumptions that are largely unchallenged.
Control- Bad
Openness- Good
Web 2.0 Ideology
Authority- Bad
Hierarchy- Bad
Amateur Creativity- Good

IDEOLOGY
The logic of the market is proposed to all members of
society as common sense.
The essence is what is not said but suggested:
the Web 2.0 concept suggests novelty...
Who benefits from the perception of a sudden
upturn rather than a steady evolution?
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

Web 2.0 is a marketing tool
A \"business revolution\"?
http://tinyurl.com/2e2agl

Versioning everything
Copyright 2.0 (94 900), Business 2.0
(1 930 000), Identity 2.0 (330 000),
Library 2.0 (1 150 000), Author 2.0
(76 600), Science 2.0 (349 000), Travel
2.0 ( 247 000), Law 2.0 (39 700), Office
2.0 (814 000), Research 2.0 (116 000)
and Love 2.0 (48 700) Google search results in brackets (07/11/07).

Web 2.0: How New Was It Really?
Tim Berners-Lee questioned whether one can use the term
in a meaningful way, since many of the technology
components of \"Web 2.0\" have existed since the early days
of the Web.
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

New?

The Web has always been social.
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

Not New: The Network Effect
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

Not New: Social Networking Sites
Classmates was founded in 1995. Match.com
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

Not New: CSS
Separation of content and presentation
Style sheets have existed since 1970s. Cascading
Style Sheets were developed as a means for creating
a consistent approach to providing style information
for web documents. The CSS Working Group
published CSS as a W3C Recommendation in 1998.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Css#History
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

Not New: Blogs
Justin Hall is often credited for pioneering blogging in 1994.
http://tinyurl.com/yjr6pq

Not New: Wikis
Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb
in 1994 and installed it on the Internet in 1995.
http://tinyurl.com/2qqsbh
http://tinyurl.com/26utwb
http://tinyurl.com/ypo99

Not new: RSS
The first version of RSS, a format for syndicating content,
was created by Netscape in 1999.
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009 http://tinyurl.com/2ghwxb

Not New: XML
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) facilitates the sharing of data across different
systems via the Internet. The XML Working Group published the first Working Draft of an
XML specification in 1996 and XML 1.0 became a “W3C Recommendation” in 1998.
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

Not New: “User-Generated Content”
Amazon.com, for instance, has allowed users to
write reviews and consumer guides since its launch
in 1995, in a form of self-publishing.
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

Popularized in 2004: Folksonomy
The practice and method of collaboratively creating and
managing tags to annotate and categorize Content.
http://tinyurl.com/d6kby
folksonomy
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

New: Not New:
User-Generated Content
Scale of Participation
Sociality on the Web
(result of steady growth)
Folksonomies
RSS, CSS, XML
Ruby on Rails
Wikis
Ajax
Blogs
(the term is new, the technologies date back to 1995)
Network Effect
Mashups
Social Networking Services
Overall Ease of Use

Conclusion

Web 2.0 is a household name.
Its suggestion of novelty is flawed.
Users are exploited but also gain much in the process:
complex tradeoff.
Social networking services become
important for activism and advocacy
Free is not cost-free
for platform providers
and free comes at a price
for users.
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

also read:
What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09
http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2009/03/what-bruce-ster.html

Trebor Scholz
scholzt@newschool.edu
New School University
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