Wk 11 | You Can't Call it "Web 2.0" if There Won't be a "Web 2.1" at Some Point
JERRY: So I guess it's fair to say you've set different goals for
yourself than say, Thomas Edison, Magellan, these types of people.
GEORGE: Magellan? You like Magellan?
JERRY: Oh, yeah,. My favorite explorer. Around the world! Come
on! Who do you like?
GEORGE: I like DeSoto.
JERRY: DeSoto? What did he do?
GEORGE: Discovered the Mississippi.
JERRY: Oh. yeah, like they wouldn't have found that anyway.
Much like the explorers in this Seinfeldian dialogue, Web 2.0-enabled city dwellers are charting new worlds in twenty-first century virtual cartography. The mash-ups discussed by Hardey (2007) are presented as resources that create "a new synergistic relationship between places and people" (p. 870). We've discussed the virtual/physical hybrid traveler before, but it seems here that user-created city mash-ups may help steer you to a nearby mocha latte while stripping you of your ability to find a great coffee place on your own. Echoing Jason a bit, I wonder if creating a virtual interface to experience the city in this way really allows you to experience the city at all; if your familiarity to the urban ins and outs is created by Web 2.0 technologies, to what extent can you experience the same ins and outs without the convenience/comfort of your smartphone? Put another way, do mobile technologies--Web 2.0-driven and otherwise--really make us more mobile, or more steered?
Whether individually mobile or collectively cattled, these virtual mapping tools are possible because of the unique participatory nature fo Web 2.0. Jenkins (2006a) writes that "fans [for example] are motivated by epistemaphilia--not simply a pleasure in knowing but a pleasure in exchanging knowledge" (p. 139). This fancy word extends well beyond the dedicated fan bases of science fiction and ratings-deprived TV shows. Epistemaphilia may very well be the defining characteristic of the active Web 2.0 user: s/he reads several blogs and participates in heated exchanges in the comments section, s/he posts reviews on Amazon of products purchased or on Google maps of restaurants visited, s/he lobbies network message boards to keep favorite shows alive, s/he tweets reactions to the latest presidential debate or Apple keynote, and s/he Twines together useful pieces of information on several niche topics. All activities define the user as part of a community, a much more social Web creature than in the days of the e-commerce dominated Web 1.0 dot-com bubble era. The driving motivator now doesn't appear to be the claim of being "right," but rather the claim of being "right there," on top of the latest Web trends and amidst the fracas of user-generated participatory dialogue. And, as Jenkins (2006a) also writes, "the value of any bit of information increases through social interaction" (p. 140); so, to plot this out a bit further, the more dialogue we can have, the more valuable our bits of information become. This one-off line from Jenkins may help explain the phenomenon of Internet memes, or, alternatively, it may prove to be nothing. The difference, of course, might be whether anyone else decides to discuss this bit of information with me (thus making it more valuable by default).
This "valuation of information" can proliferate through social interactions that transcend geographical boundaries, as Jenkins (2006b) explores with his notion of "pop cosmopolitanism." I can appreciate this article in a personal way; I grew up in a town where you might have been recognized a cultural world traveler if you played the latest Chumbawamba track at a 7th grade make-out party. (For the record, I got knocked down when my date didn't show up, but I did get up again. No, you're never gonna keep me down, Jessie McCollum.) Jenkins, drawing on Iwabuchi, introduces "the distinction between the circulation of cultural goods that are essentially "odorless," bearing few traces of their cultural origins, and those that are embraced for their culturally distinctive "fragrance" (p. 159). In the pre-Web 2.0 rural America of my upbringing, cultural diversity was overwhemingly odorless; the Chinese restaurant's most popular item, sweet and sour chicken, was served on a placemat showing the Chinese New Year while non-threatening, vaguely Asian muzak played in the background. Odorless cultural flows are a social survival tool in traditional, culturally entrenched localities, yet the most pungent goods are the ones that label you as a pop cosmopolitan (or, more simply, "the weird kid"). While I found this article engaging and interesting, I failed to see its connection to Web 2.0 emerge explicitly enough to be included in this week's readings. Perhaps if Jenkins would have explored the grassroots convergence idea in more detail--as he does at least somewhat in "Blog This"--especially as it applies to Web culture and not television, I could have seen its Web 2.0 value.
But to overuse the term "Web 2.0" may undervalue the significance of the changed Web itself. When the dot-com bubble burst, for example, it left many people wondering why they had bought into the hype of the Web in the first place, and how the future of online interaction would ever recover. As it turned out, the fire that burned so many investors was a cleansing one, like those that occur naturally in forests: overcrowding is harmful to progressive development, and every once in awhile there needs to be a radical clearing to allow for new growth. Ironically, this new growth is actually a return to the old forest. When Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1990-91 as a user-friendly interface to let people access the burgeoning information found on the Internet, he hoped that it would be built collaboratively, that Web users would “be involved in a two-way process, not only reading web pages, but also adding to and amending them, creating links and, of course, creating new pages” as David Gauntlett (2004) writes in Web.Studies (p. 6). This Greco-democratic Web utopia—a two-lane information superhighway, if you will—may still be a long way off, existing in its purest form only in Berners-Lee’s best intentions, but we are now witnessing this re-growth of change for the Web in its 2.0 incarnation. In many respects, Web 2.0 is a return toward Berners-Lee’s vision and it represents a progressive step backwards in the right direction.
We still remain many steps away, but blog advocates would have us believe that their form of writing on the Web marks the long-awaited read-write WWW that Berners-Lee envisioned. Using the "Going Underground" blog as an example, Hardey (2007) writes that "It is common for the content of blogs to reflect comments, suggestions or links from visitors so that a dialogue may develop between these mediated depictions of the city and their actively engaged audience" (p. 873). I think all too often scholars and laypeople alike conflate dialogue on the Web with a true two-way process. Simply commenting on a blog post does not actually empower the user as an agent of change for that post's content; it merely enables a voice to tack on extra thoughts to existing content for all the world to see. The exchange is not equal. Though this talk-back feature didn't exist as prevalently in Web 1.0, I still think we've seen this kind of radical new innovation before. I can attach a Post-It note to a flier on the telephone pole outside of I Heart NY Pizza, but that doesn't change what's written on the flier to begin with. I remain underwhelmed.
I am similarly unstunned by Fagerjord's "Rhetorical Convergence," but he can offer some insight into the confluence of modes that often marks Web 2.0 interactions. His analysis of VG Nett reveals it to be a piece of online rhetorical convergence of modes: "when VG Nett remediates, it remediates many media" (p. 306). He proposes "to understand such hybrid Web texts as VG Nett as results of rhetorical convergence, emphasizing how different styles and sign systems are combined into complex texts and thus also complex significations and reader selections and processes of semiosis" (p. 307). On hybrid Web texts like VG Nett, and more recent examples of Web 2.0 efforts, these multiple avenues of communication (both competing and cooperative) engage the user in compelling forms of active participation with the sites themselves by forcing them to experience content through divergent forms (p. 316). This diversity of content, and the degree to which each Web user can become a publisher with WYSIWYG tools, illustrates the epistemaphilic desire to share knowledge beyond the constraints of read-only text.
In closing, I'd like to point out that, for me, one of the strongest themes that emerged from this week's readings is how, despite the recency of these articles (the oldest is 2003), they are largely unoriginal and uninteresting already. Aside from the virtual city mapping angle that Hardey undertakes (what about the ruralites, ***hole?!?), I failed to notice much discussion of Web 2.0 itself that I hadn't already heard hashed and rehashed ad infinitum since the term was coined in 2004. That's not to say that these authors don't have useful contributions on the research of Web 2.0; rather, this demonstrates the difficulty that new media/Web 2.0 scholars encounter with the demands of publishing interesting pieces on emerging technologies when the technologies themselves are just passing the cusp of interestingness. These readings also demonstrate how "Web 2.0" has become a frustratingly accomodating term, encompassing almost anything that involves social participation to one degree or another.
Finally, then, returning to my epigraph, it appears that Hardey alone is Jerry's Magellan, charting new areas of the largely unexplored, while Jenkins and Fagerjord remain second-tier De Soto's, bragging about discoveries that would have been found anyway.
Alternative titles for this blog post:
*Blogging is dead already; microcontent is Web 2.1
*I owe an apology to that creepy kid in my freshman dorm who did nothing but watch scantily clad anime all day. You, sir, are not a hermetically sealed perv making no attempt to conceal an obsession with Asian women; you are a "pop cosmopolitan" (who still makes no attempt to conceal an obsession with Asian women)