http://firstmonday.org/article/view/2138/1945

http://firstmonday.org/article/view/2138/1945

Introduction

As a teenager, coming of age in East Berlin in the 1980s, I was frequently questioned by Western European tourists who were amused by the nightly state–delivered television shows in our country. They could not understand what made interviews with factory workers or farmers newsworthy. And indeed, the German–style reality of Socialism force–fed the ideas of the ruling class to the people, the imagined shareholders in this collective social experiment. Today, in the United States, I am startled by the total takeover of market ideologues. The desires and needs of young users seem to match neatly with the needs of corporaties. There is, to be sure, a difference between the needs of users and the rhetoric of marketers who claim to cater to their desires. It is useful to remember that the desires of users did not grow in a vacuum; they are largely created by the market machine in the first place. Web 2.0 is a good example of marketers entering the discussion about the Internet.
From Love 2.0 to copyright, law, business, and even authorship, the versioning virus has infected many writers [1]. The root of this branding mania and obsession with newness is the phrase Web 2.0, which is not solely a marketing buzzword but also a household name, not unlike Wonder Bread [2]. To this day the definition of Web 2.0 is vague at best and those who claim novelty for the technologies associated with the phrase, are wrong. The widespread adaptation of the phrase, however, makes it hard to ignore it as a fad. The Web 2.0 hype drew broad media attention and financial resources to businesses that manage to profit from networked social production [3], amateur participation online, fan cultures, social networking, podcasting, and collective intelligence [4].
The Web 2.0 Ideology, however, goes far beyond the confines of these recent phenomena. It does not solely embrace “a series of ethical assumptions about media, culture, and technology” that worships the creative amateur [5]. This ideology is a framing device of professional elites that define what enters the public discourse about the impact of the Internet on society.
As an épistémè, Web 2.0 filters from a large number of statements those that are acceptable within public discourse [6]. By defining what is associated with the Web today as common sense, it directs the imagination of its future. The following passages will demonstrate the ideological function of this concept and its associated technologies and phrases.