The Myths Before and Beyond Web 2.0

The telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television, they are all forms of communication. What are very interesting are the myths that surround these mediums. After reading through both, Digital sublime: myth, power and cyberspace-When old myths were new by Mosco, V. and the conclusion to Personal Connection in the Digital Age by Nancy Baym, I have come to better understand what Web 2.0 is and how it works.

There were a few things that I found interesting in these articles. First off in the Digital sublime article, it talks about how all these previous technologies have had the myths about how they will "end all". After reading this, a question arose in my head. When we look at Web 2.0, it encompasses all of the former mediums listed above. You can achieve telephone communications, radio, and television all on this one medium. Does that mean that all these former myths that were attached to these technologies arise again? So could Web 2.0 really end it all? I stumbled upon a quote in the Mosco V. article that is interesting, "Put simply, we want to believe that our era is unique in transforming the world, as we have known it." (Mosco V.) I think Web 2.0 truly has transformed our world. I believe this mainly because no other medium has encompassed all the other mediums that have come before it. Web 2.0 has accomplished this. It changes everything. It's all right there in one form, access to all sorts of communication technologies.

I found something very interesting in the Nancy Baym reading. "By being conscientious and aware of what media offer, what choices we make with them, and what consequences those choices have for us, we can intervene in and influence the process of norm development in our own relationships, our peer and familial groups, and our cultures"(Nancy Baym, Pg. 155). What I get from this quote is that even though Web 2.0 is sometimes looked upon as an evil creature or a machine, it has its positive points. It is said that Web 2.0 is the machine, and Web 2.0 is us, so we are the machine. This is interesting because after reading this quote and if you accept that we are the machine, it would seem to me that Web 2.0 is only a learning tool. Something we can use to help learn about ourselves. Through using the web we learn about how we can make our culture, families, our own relationships, better than they were before.

Grappling Web 2.0

What I'm doing right now is contributing to Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is described by Tim O'Rielly and John Battelle as "an aura of data which, when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mind bending implications." After reading these two articles I have come to believe is that web 2.0 is a child, but unlike a regular child where it would have one or two parents, this child has millions of parents, all contributing to its growth and learning. The smarter we get, the smarter the web gets. There is a belief that Web 2.0 is growing faster and becoming smarter than us. I do not believe this. I think Web 2.0 will grow faster than us because it has so many "parents" feeding it knowledge, but I think Web 2.0 is dependent on us. Without us, Web 2.0 does not receive data or gateways to connect information, thus it does not grow. On the other hand, as the years go by, I am a firm believer that we are becoming more dependent on the web. Crowdsourcing, which is described by John Battelle and Tim O'Rielly as "a large group of people that can create a collective work whose value far exceeds that provided by any of the individual participants." makes the internet so much easier to look up the information and acquire the things we need, that we become dependent on it. Wikipedia or eBay are perfect examples of this.

Everyone leaves a bit of information on the web, which is called an "information shadow". This is one of the ways how Web 2.0 grows. I think this is scary since the web is so global. You must read between the lines to actually realize what you’re sacrificing when uploading information to Facebook or Twitter. I think that's scary. I think you give away a bit of your soul and identity when using these sites. Nothing is free in this world.

The article by John Battelle and Tim O'Rielly seems to take a more positive spin on the idea of Web 2.0 saying that’s it’s a platform that people should use and are already using to create a "better world". It seems like they want us to embrace Web 2.0 and use it to our fullest advantage. In the article by Zimmer, he addresses Web 2.0 in a negative way. He wants us to view the consequences of leaving information on the web, and wants us to remember that our identities can be lost on the web because of "a blurring of the boundaries between Web users and producers, consumption and participation, authority and amateurism, play and work, data and the network, reality and vitality." My personal view according to web 2.0 is a minimalist view. I agree with the Zimmer article, and believe that the consequences are very real, and dangerous to us. I think we should get back to basics and start discovering things for ourselves.