NOTES+ ON GOING

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

                                         Converted to Notes Version
                                             By Ed Scholtz


-What is wrong with interviewing common people doing common jobs? Should we not be interested in how society works 
-East German interviewed industry workers as part of their news
-Young users have been brainwashed by "market ideolouges"

" The desires and needs of young users seem to match neatly with the needs of corporaties."
 -There is a loop between brainwasher and brain washee, as both influnce the other.
-Web 2.0 is an example of this connection.



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

The Shifting Definitions of Web 2.0

In 2004, the founder of a large technology publishing house, open source software proponent and multi–millionaire Tim O’Reilly coined the phrase Web 2.0, together with a colleague. The event producers needed a catchy title for an upcoming conference. Later, the event title was expanded into a concept that proposed a separation of various versions of the Web. “The Internet was back! This shiny new version of the Internet, the dream of a fully networked, always–connected society was finally going to be realized. The Internet would democratize Big Media, Big Business, Big Government.” [7]
Mr. O’Reilly characterized Web 1.0 through a set of static, one–way browser–based applications like personal Web sites and the encyclopedia Britannica Online, publishing, content management systems, and taxonomies. Subsequently, he distinguished Web 2.0 by associating it with the “new participatory architectures of the Web” that allow for online services such as the photo sharing site Flickr, blogs, the peer–to–peer file sharing standard BitTorrent, Wikipedia, event sites like Upcoming.org, the file–sharing service Napster, wikis (collaborative Web sites that allow for real–time editing), folksonomies (user–generated taxonomies), and the aggregation of online content through Web feeds [8].
The definition morphed considerably over time. Late in 2005 O’Reilly wrote that:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications  & [are] 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 & deliver rich user experiences. [9]

O’Reilly was onto something. Not only was he accurate about the network effect but he also understood the increasing importance of participation online. The network effect holds true for telephones and fax machines but also for social networking sites. The more people own a telephone, the more valuable this technology becomes. There is no point in owning a fax machine if none of your friends or clients have one at their avail. And equally, on Facebook, you will only be able to track down old buddies if very many people congregate on this site. People like to be where other people are. O’Reilly was also cognizant of the fact that now U.S. Americans at least had for a large part broadband access to the Internet, which set the stage for the success of Ajax, an important Web developing technique. His only possibly willful misinterpretation was that none of this had launched like a Web 2.0 rocket just in 2004.