After reading the article Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On http://www.web2summit.com/web2009/public/schedule/detail/10194, I can say that I have a better understanding of what the term Web 2.0 means as well as a basic idea as to where it is predicted to go in the future. The way in which the article was written, by explaining how it came about, where it is now and where it is going was very useful in introducing me, or I should say re-introducing me, formally, to the concept of Web 2.0, a term created by the authors of this article in order to explain today’s Web capabilities.
The Web has become a regular household member, a friend, a colleague, a business partner that enables us to enhance almost everything we are mentally capable of doing as human beings. Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle describe Web 2.0 as a newborn baby learning how to use its senses. From this analogy, we can understand that the Web has not nearly hit its full potential but is just beginning to grow up. I am critical of this notion that the Web seems to be growing up without us and ‘could leave us behind’ and would rather say that to actively participate in our society, a technological culture moving forward, we do have to at least understand its current applications and foresee where the Web is going. We have to recognize its power, appreciate what it can do for us but beware of the implications and costs.
We are no longer describing it as a service that is available to us, but as O’Reilly and Battelle put it, a platform that we contribute to, help grow and share with other people.
“Chief among our insights was that "the network as platform" means far more than just offering old applications via the network ("software as a service"); it means building applications that literally get better the more people use them, harnessing network effects not only to acquire users, but also to learn from them and build on their contributions”
There has seemingly never been a better platform to practice our right of freedom of speech (as always, with limitations.) It gives us as ‘audiences’ as we were previously considered, the power to put our own advertisements out there, create art that people can appreciate on a large scale and even start political movements. Media giants, governments and massive companies are not the only mass communicators anymore...
Web 2.0 goes hand in hand with Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/barthes06.htm in which he wrote that meaning is only what the reader makes it. Regardless of the author’s intentions, a text will be interpreted in so many different ways depending on the socio-economic, historical, cultural background of who is interpreting it. Today, we are seeing and reading content on the web, but we as the readers and viewers become the authors as we interpret what we see, comment on it and even rewrite is as our own interpretation of its meaning.
On the other hand, I wonder, are these applications creating a generation that is perhaps a bit full of themselves? Are we taking this freedom to express our ideas a little bit too far; where it is no longer knowledge and ideas that we share but meaningless jabber about our personal lives...and where does it stop?
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