The End of Web 2.0

Posted on August 26, 2006
Filed Under For Argument's Sake, European Web 2.0 |

Dion Hinchcliffe is ramping up a debate about how Web 2.0 will play out - at this blog over here and referencing a number of commentators who are looking at what he calls the Internet Singularity, a term first coined by Microsoft’s Gary Flake.

Five years ago, if you looked around the corners of the Internet hymn sheet, the buzz was around knowledge management, and of course XML got people thinking about digital libraries, though in fact all along “community” had made an impact and no discussion was complete without some appraisal of how information sharing could be pegged down to a community activity.

In my experience what was driving users as opposed to developers during that time was the sense that life under the computing paradigm had to make more sense.

Folks were tied to the desk and the enterprise was becoming as marshalled and controlled by computing as the assembly line and production line had been by industrial Fordism.

You may even remember economists pointing out that there had been no marked economic gain from IT investments.

Socially, work-wise and in the macro-economic sphere computing and even the internet made less sense to us users than it did to investors and geeks.

The internet, more than computing, though began to make sense when we started to connect and those i-village type connections were made.

Of late the web has allowed us back into our lives, it’s broken down conformity and ridigity and what we experience as users is a bit like the 1960s: creative, fun, connected, sexual, even pornographic. New values are propagating.

But this perspective is not the linear progress, or even disruptive progress, that people within large computing organisations reference to track change.

We’re getting some of our worklife back by being able to surf and by the imagery we can enjoy. We’re having our creativity augmented by digital image capture and simple upoad services. Feeds seem to be better than old fashioned push technologies at keeping us informed. Life is about discovery again so we feel young. There are opportunities to create lifestyle businesses around content provision, just like in the 1960s there was proliferation of ‘zines.

Numerous platforms have opened up, that recreate the possibilities of local theatres and take us back to the days when entertainment meant what we do together rather than how we are entertained.

Personal discovery and the rediscovery of social values are becoming possible. An increasing visibility of the diversity of moral values and a reassertion of the importance of moral values is also in train.

It seems to me these are the important Web 2.0 observations. For the enterpise, Web 2.0 technologies will provide greater possibilities to engage with multiple creative webs - but is that more or less significant than having to deal with multiple, empowered, moral frameworks in the workforce.

For companies in the computing paradigm will Web 2.0 in fact be the end of the PCs dominance in our communications networks? I expect TV will take over once computing functionality passes to the living room and the TV screen.

Content will become so integral to our lives that the workplace and the enterprise will become alien and resented unless the enterprise and its applications harness our enthusiasm. This too is a side effect of Web 2.0 but Web 2.0 has to provide ways that people will eagerly participate in and out of work.

Finally Web 2.0 is a misnomer. 8 years ago we used the term community and we’re still playing out the enthusiasm people brought to the new sense of community. Web 2.0 is nothing without the desire people have to do things together after four decades of comformity and isolation.

If you want to know how Web 2.0 will play out then you have to get inside the moral frameworks people bring to it.

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