Pew Internet Life’s new report Riding the Waves of “Web2.0?, another investigation into the meaning of the term, doesn’t contain a lot of surprises for readers of this blog, though they may find its conclusions controversial.
After explaining the origins and the perceived meaning of Web 2.0, the report argues that, “despite all of this commotion over collaboration, participation and emancipation from static information”, the things we do using web 2.0 applications are old hat. The report suggests that people have been uploading photos, writing personal web pages and discussing issues and products with other users for as long as the web has existed.
The closing paragraph sums this up nicely:
Whatever language we use to describe it, the beating heart of the internet has always been its ability to leverage our social connections. Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Friendster struck a powerful social chord at the right time with the right technology, but the actions they enable are nothing new.
It then goes on to say:
A trip to the Geocities homepage on the “Wayback Machine†circa December 19, 1996 (courtesy of The Internet Archive) yields this decidedly quaint statement from the company: “We have more than 200,000 individuals sharing their thoughts and passions with the world, and creating the most diverse and unique content on the Web.†Replace “200,000†with “100 million†and you could almost imagine this sentence appearing on the MySpace homepage.
So what we have now, as far as this analysis is concerned, is more people doing the same things. Why, then, are people talking about a Web 2.0 at all? To a lot of people, we shouldn’t be. They’d say there’s no revolution, only evolution.
I am sympathetic to this view, despite my obvious allegiances: I get the point. A couple of extra considerations may change the conclusions of the report, though.
Firstly, more people alters things in more ways than one. 200,000 vs 100mn users is not just a 50X difference in scale. 200,000 is the population of a small town. 100mn is the combined population of France and Spain. More than 60% of the adults in the UK have internet access; among children, the figure is nearly 100%. The Internet is now an enormous social and cultural force. Communicating with my mother via email and using a shared photo site would have been impossible until 2005, because she didn’t “see any point having a computer”. Now, every member of my family is online. What the country (and much of the world) sees, reads, believes, our culture and common experience, is directly affected by cyberspace in a way that simply wasn’t true as little as two years ago.
Social Media – the blogs and podcasts and social bookmarks and customer review sites – now has a power equivalent to the mainstream, with bloggers having the ability to shape the mainstream news agenda and to make or break the fortunes of companies. Would there ever have been millions of dollars spent on laptop battery recalls by Apple, Dell and others without the ability of social media to move pretty isolated incidents directly into the eye of public attention? Without digg and YouTube and thousands of bloggers pointing their fingers? I very much doubt it. The expectation of free-flowing information, self-publishing and participation in a conversation are very widespread, and is again, something that did not exist until a couple of years ago.
The databases and other resources we use and create on the Internet, from search to flickr pictures to wikis are the product of almost everyone, not a select group of geeks. Web 2.0 services often rely on the power of network effects, the idea that the power of the network is the square of the number of users. There would be no point to a social network like MySpace, for example, if none of your friends are on it. If all your friends are on it, then it becomes the hub of your internet activity. This also makes ‘wisdom of crowds’ applications like Wikipedia, eBay reputations and Google plausible and usable, since we now have the necessary diversity and volume of data to generated useful results.
Second, in addition to general public access – in the Western world at least – the quality of internet access has also improved in a way that is more than numerical. When I first joined CompuServe in the early nineties, my brand-new modem operated at 28.8kbps. Now I get speeds up to 8Mbps. That doesn’t mean I can just do the same thing a lot faster, though that’s also true, it means I can do completely different things. I can upload all my photos; I can watch movies in real time; I can use rich AJAX applications that continually refresh the data I’m viewing or creating; I can speak to people using VOIP; I can download the new content from a hundred websites to my feed reader in just a few seconds. The focus of where I do things is slowly but irreversibly changing from my desktop to my online services.
So more people and faster connections are certainly the foundations of Web 2.0. But it is reductionist to claim that’s just an increase in scale. What those two ingredients actually enable is the ’something different’ that we really mean by the term: social media, read/write web, the wisdom of crowds, web as platform, rich applications, and the power of data.
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Thanks Ian, a great post as always. My overriding thought while reading this (with the mandatory Shiraz in hand of course):
It’s about threshold. Of course the web is evolving. Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 — I mean c’mon? Someone didn’t really just upgrade the web. It’s been evolving rapidly since, well for ever, and everybody, but everybody, appreciates that, but…
Web 2.0 suggests we’ve crossed a value threshold. It’s all about what the users are getting out of it. As you suggested — a different number of users (by a factor of 10, 100 or even 1,000) means that the benefits are different. Network online with 5 or 10 other similarly like-minded individuals and you get an ‘interesting’ experience. Network with 100 or more on a broader topic and you start to ‘taste’ a more lifelike reality. Day-to-day existence is a complicated network of interations with hundreds and thousands of individuals. In the ‘90s the average surfer shared web experiences with her best friends and loved ones and perhaps did some shopping. Now we are extending our interactions on the ‘interweb’ (love that) to as many people we don’t already know as is the case offline (perhaps considerably more). Our Internet ‘social experience’ is approximating our offline ‘social experience’ and that’s why (as users) we’ve perceived a paradigm shift. A philosophical or at least a social psychological question is whether people (generally) are more ‘at ease / comfortable’ interacting online than they are offline?
Great post, great blog — beer soon?
Hi there Dave: since “the beating heart of the internet has always been its ability to leverage our social connections”, I am definitely up for a beer soon!
I think that, yes, we’ve crossed a value threshold. The internet suddenly = real life. It’s the speed at which this has happened — 18 months perhaps? — that catches people unawares, and makes them resistant to the idea that there has been a *cough* paradigm shift.
I agree that we are seeing a “paradigm shift.” These new technologies do let us do more things both in a qualitative as well as a quantitative sense.
My fear is that these new technologies also generate new avenues for bad people to spread fear and hatred. I’m not talking about spam, I’m talking about sophisticated people using sophisticated technology to lie and deceive on a massive, virally-spread scale.
How do we control this? Assume that self regulation will be generated through the spread of education and political self determination? Will that be enough?
The idea of ‘truthiness’ in social media is an interesting one, and as you say there are some substantial dangers. The recent Google/MLK scandal illustrates that pretty well, I think. Did you have some other particular incidences in mind, Dennis, such as marketing campaigns?
I wasn’t thinking about marketing. For example, I don’t consider Wal-Mart’s foray into social networking evil, just poorly implemented.
I was thinking more in terms of politics and inernational relations. For example, it will soon (if it isn’t already) be impossible to tell what videos are real and what aren’t. This means that for propaganda purposes it will be possible for anyone to virally spread realistic fake news reports concerning atrocities, murders, massive civil rights violtions — you name it — in order to stir up opposition to or hatred/mistrust of another nation/religion/interest group/ethnic group/etc.
I see what you’re saying. But then, old media is hardly politically neutral. Newspaper and television network owners and advertisers generally have a pro-government, pro-capitalist agenda which very clearly affects the news agenda.
That’s not to say I am unconcerned by the issue you raise. But I think at the moment there is more to be gained through social media than we appear to be losing. I may change my mind about that if your dystopic fears start to become the norm, to be sure.
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 communication 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.
Everything changes so fast on cyberspace that establishing the boundaries between different generations of web technologies become subjective.
The major underlying trend that I see is that participation is becoming easier.