July 31, 2007
just getting on facebook? forget it. the next big thing is rejecting social networking.
in other (yet seemingly related) news, luke tells me that a bunch of australians have discovered that printers are as bad as cigarette smoke. i don’t have a printer so maybe i can start smoking now. clearly, it’ll all balance out and i’ll look cooler and sexier!
July 28, 2007
i first came across the term “web 2.0″ a few years ago when i had to write a blog entry about its use for NGOs as part of a job application. i had to do it in english and french. i bet someone had a good laugh about that considering i have minus 100 intelligence en francais. anyway, i thought web 2.0 was one either one of those masturbatory marketing buzzwords (which it is, thanks to tim o’reilly) or one of those terms people who have no idea what they’re talking about use to look smart. so i was totally prepared to ignore it and never think about it again.
but i got the job (i guess my nerd skillz are better than my french) and i quickly learnt that web 2.0 was just about the only way to describe all this cool new stuff happening on the web. oddly though, i was already aware of what web 2.0 describes, i just didn’t see it as so clearly different from the way the web was before. its like the term has changed our perception of the web, like the creation of a syndrome or a disease by naming of set of symptoms which can be treated, stigmatized, studied, or otherwise embed with meaning.(schizophrenia didn’t “exist” before someone named it, drug companies create syndromes all the time to sell more drugs).
anyway, i started using the term (even though i quietly threw up in my mouth each time, as cato would say). having a nice simple term is pretty handy when you want to discuss something without having to go into a lengthy description of what you mean each time. the only problem though is that the term web 2.0 only makes sense to other web geeks, and even then its really pretty nebulous (is it the rounded corners? the gibberish names? the power of many eyeballs? wait… wasn’t that usenet?). worse still, people who have never heard it before find it rather confusing and think it actually refers to a concrete set of technologies.
the other problem is that it did start out as an elite marketing buzzword, created by tim o’reilly. according to paul graham, he actually had a conference and then famously tried to sue another conference for using it in their name, even though web 2.0 is supposed to be about openness, user generated content and all that. and as an annoying marketing buzzword, it started out with more hype than substance. its gotten progressively worse, especially with people talking about web 3.0 and 4.0 without any idea what they’re saying.
all in all, the term sucks. but we keep using it cuz there’s no alternative. and this is why i’ve decided to start using “the social web” to describe SNSes et al. instead. it’s actually descriptive, and doesn’t have a misleading version number in it. i’ve noticed a few other bloggers using it too, such as ian wilker. since i’m all about “be the change” i went and updated the wikipedia entry to reflect this new definition too >:] let the editwars begin!
July 27, 2007
perth had its first ever barcamp last month.
con wiebrands (the ass-kicking curtin librarian who helped convince the evil tech admins to unblock twitter and facebook on campus) and i did a talk on explaining web 2.0 to n00bs, such as older folks or university admin who think the internet is full of pedophiles and hackers.
there were a lot more education/librarian people than i expected, which was cool for getting a more broad range of views. i have, however, found that perth seems to have a lot of little pockets of people doing cool stuff but they tend to keep it to themselves. there isn’t as much cross-pollination as there should be.
the last session was entitled silicon beach (get it? huh huh? like silicon valley… but better cuz theres a beach) which was all about putting perth on the map and overcoming the interia that keeps perth quiet. this was where the microsoft guy, scott barnes, who had come to demo silverlight, revealed that he was also there to sniff out the cool shit going on in perth. he diplomatically told us that we still have a bit of work to do.
but you know what? i think the problem of the little pockets of cool that don’t talk to each other is the real problem. there is cool stuff starting to happen in perth, it’s just hard to find. in the past two weeks, i’ve discovered there were a bunch of killer festivals going on in the next few months, my favourite of which being the byte me! festival of digital geek creativity in december, which has an incredible lineup of VJs, game designers, electronic musicians and thinkers from perth and around the world.
Tags: byteme, barcampperth, web2.0, australia, perth
July 4, 2007
my friend adam passed along this insane job description for “social media officer” at the university of toronto.
Experience:
Minimum five years experience working in the field of new media from a content perspective, including web design/architecture, preferably in a large organization. A high degree of knowledge of and experience with “Web 2.0” tools (Wikis, RSS, Podcasting) is essential as is intuition for continued developments in new technologies — especially “Web 2.0” and “Web 3.0” technologies. (Intuition about the possible direction of “Web 4.0” is also important) Equally essential is a high degree of demonstrated, successful project management experience.
what? did they read some joke about web 3.0 and think it was serious? the term “web 2.0″ was used to describe changes on the web after they happened. you can’t just talk web 3.0 or web 4.0 into existence. besides, web 2.0 basically means everything and nothing, using it as a naming convention is like building your house on sand.
remember the hype and vapourware and non-existant business models of the 90s that led to the first dot com crash? yeah. this isn’t a good sign.
fono says: man, this means i can’t make jokes about web 3.0 anymore. to be leading edge you really have to talk about web 27.0 now.
June 26, 2007
kinda old in internet time, but what the hay:
HYPERCAMP: super mega two point oh! (it makes me exhausted just looking at it). kinda an accidental commentary on the blogging/web 2.0/web conference culture eh?
Tags: hypercamp, web 2.0, web2.0, thesis
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May 21, 2007
the other day, i went to a workshop for phd students. no one was sitting there on their laptops half listening while they blogged or looked at web comics. everyone was sitting attentively, making notes on paper, with pens!
i told this story to luke last night. i was telling him about how perth has not yet been taken over web 2.0 craziness that is going on in north america. i’m not talking web 2.0 just in terms of flickr and wikipedia and round corners and crazy colours and folksonomies and all the other usual suspects (they aren’t really big yet here either), but the greater cultural movement surrounding it all. it’s what i can only describe as the web 2.0 hipster culture which i was happily partaking in until i ran away to perth to do my phd. it’s people working at starbucks on their on their black macbooks covered in stickers of web 2.0 and open source brands. its the workaholism, the capitalist leftism and the melding of the gift economy with for-profit enterprises. it’s the the blurring of personal and professional, of leisure and work. it’s having your friends and people you know professionally adding you on facebook. it’s the “unconferences”: barcamp, torcamp, drupalcamp, campcamp, all with 5000 pictures taken with digital slrs complete with the official tag on flickr. 
its the implicit belief running through all this that old power structures are being overturned, that we’re fighting the man. when in reality, old hierarchies and power structures are being reworked and reproduced. web 2.0 brands are the new man.
i have a complicated relationship with web 2.0 (both the tools and the culture). i loved sxsw (which i would argue is the king of all web 2.0 conferences), it was the most amazing week of my life and i met incredible people. i love my macbook with all my stickers and my slr and my flickr account and my livejournal. i’m addicted to checking all my digital hang outs to see if anyone has commented on a photo or added me as a friend. but when i use the term web 2.0, but cringe a little each time. i didn’t really know why before, but now i realise i’m totally complicit not only the left’s overwhelming lack of critical analysis of web 2.0, but an often unquestioning endorsement of its ideologies and brands. sure, the ideology behind web 2.0 is openness, participation, empowering the user, but lest we forget that most web 2.0 services (save wikipedia) are for-profits, and run by either google or yahoo. all good lefties should know the problems that come with big corporations and for-profit orientations. we didn’t like nike for selling us a lifestyle rather than a shoe, which was made in a sweatshop. i articulate my identity with my choice in web 2.0 services and how i use them (and whose stickers i put on my laptop), just like i buy starbucks so i can walk around with the cup looking hip, or nike shoes so i can feel athletic. google has 10 years of my search history and myspace owns my profile. yahoo helped send a chinese journalist to jail. why are we any less angry, or at least less critical? how did we forget all the anti-branding, anti-consumerism, no logo stuff from the 90s? is it because we really are consuming ideas and symbols in the truest sense, rather than physical commodities?
along with these more abstract economic, political and semiotic issues, web 2.0 technology and culture are further facilitating the very real encroachment of work into every other facet of life. being in such a completely different work context of a phd in a city like perth really helped me to see this. at first it annoyed me that i couldn’t get wifi in the cafes and my internet access sucked. it drove me crazy that i actually had to go out in the real world to find stuff, rather than find the information online. and i didn’t like it that no one used upcoming or flickr. but then i realised why this was the case i saw that this lack of 2.0 was actually a really good thing. perth is a really laid back place. people go to cafes to relax, not work, so they don’t care that there’s no wifi. there isn’t even a starbucks here. everything closes around 5 or 6 most days. there are lots of holidays where nothing is open and the few places that are charge a 15% holiday tax because the poor souls who have to work that day have to get paid shitloads for their trouble.
as my friend collette noted, wifi is both a liberator and an enslaver. if its possible to do work anywhere because of wifi, then it becomes expected. if you can do things so much faster because you can just do a search for it online, then you’re expected to do everything quickly. its expected you’ll do so much more everyday. you get 5000 emails instead of talking to people in person or on the phone.
one of the few critiques of web 2.0 culture that i’ve come across is tiziana terranova’s Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy, which offers an amazing analysis of the political economy of web 2.0 (ironically, before the term was even coined), including a discussion of this shift in work culture. she argues that the process of the “social factory” (made popular by the italian autonomists) can be seen in the digital economy - “work processes have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine.” this shift was made possible materially and ideologically by the internet (and i would argue, even more by web 2.0):
The expansion of the Internet has given ideological and material support to contemporary trends toward increased flexibility of the workforce, continuous reskilling, freelance work, and the diffusion of practices such as “supplementing” (bringing supplementary work home from the conventional office).
but the worst part, for me at least, is that web 2.0 culture and tools turn leisure into work. the entire web becomes a professional space. there are no boundaries between work and leisure when everyone you work with is using the same services as you. everything you do online becomes peformative. adding photos to flickr, editing your facebook profile, bookmarking something on delicious, updating your blog. all of these things are part of your digital resume. and if you aren’t participating, you’re a nobody.
there’s a glamorization of all this work as leisure too. critiquing don tapscott’s “digital economy,” terranonva offers some insight into why this might be the case:
For Tapscott, therefore, the digital economy magically resolves the contradictions of industrial societies, such as class struggle: while in the industrial economy the “worker tried to achieve fulfillment through leisure [and]… was alienated from the means of production which were owned and controlled by someone else,” in the digital economy the worker achieves fulfillment through work and finds in her brain her own, unalienated means of production.
knowingly or not, i think we’re increasingly finding (or being told to find) fulfillment through work, so we work all the time. if we believe that work is fulfilling, then who needs leisure? this shift in thinking isn’t new, but its being accelerated and magnified by web 2.0 culture and tools which provide both the ideology and the material necessary for work as life. alienated or not, i don’t think this was what marx really had in mind.
this is why i love being back at school here in perth. the web has become a leisure activity again. i don’t feel like i need to spend all my time managing my digital identity. i don’t get 5000 emails a day or have work conversations on msn in the middle of the night. my leisure time is my own. i have the space and the time to think and digest and live.
but, as i was telling all this to luke, i looked at upcoming and saw that perth’s first barcamp is happening in june. and my heart sank. my little refuge will soon no longer be. but im going, of course. i can only hope that we can do web 2.0 hipsterdom here with a good healthy dose of perth culture.
Tags: web2.0, web 2.0, curtin, thesis, australia, barcamp, perth
May 7, 2007
i found an amazing article today on the political economy of facebook, myspace and the other usual suspects written by ryan bigge (former adbusters staffer before kalle lasn went apeshit and turned the mag into an antisemitic brand of shoes).
basically, bigge argues that use of social networking sites can actually be seen as unpaid work. in using such facebook et al, we’re essentially producing a stream of self-surveillance that can be monitored, repackaged and sold. for example, taken collectively, we’re voluntarily producing huge databases of our preferences that are a marketers dream (think recommendations on amazon.com - customers who bought this also liked…) its the darker side of web 2.0’s utopian wisdom of crowds that created wikipedia. but also more broadly, the entire value of facebook is entirely in its users and the networks they’ve created, without any financial compensation. writing in the same vein as bigge, fred scharmen notes that even on flickr, the users are creating all the content that drives visits to the site, which in turn provides the eyeballs that can be sold to advertisers. did you know myspace also claims ownership of its user’s profiles? so even your online identity is commodifiable content.
the big takeaway for me though was the realization that this could be why we all resent facebook, but still use it. we’re aware on some level that something isn’t right, that we’re giving away something we shouldn’t be. but if we opt out and refuse to use facebook, we’re essentially a nobody. as bigge puts it: “In this environment [Facebook et al.], the digital enclosure generates increasingly polarized options: either the constant, self-generated surveillance of the type described by Stites or the self-negation (“You don’t exist”) that social network avoidance entails.”
bigge also points out the gaming-elements in social networks that make them similar to WoW which i mentioned earlier, and brings this into his analysis of the political economy of social networking:
But digital gardening, like its soil-based equivalent, requires commitment and effort. The
question becomes: are MySpace users at all aware of the political economy of the space in
which they operate? As Kline, et al. (2003) demonstrate, the line between work and play in
the video game arena grows increasingly fuzzy. Wittel (2001), meanwhile, argues that “The
assimilation of work and play corresponds with the blurring of boundaries between work
and private life, between colleagues and friends.”
One can draw parallels between the effort required to invite friends into your MySpace
network and the repetitive work involved in collecting gold in online gaming environments
like EverQuest or World of Warcraft. Cassidy (2006) quotes different Facebook users:
“I remember people competing to see how many ‘friends’ they could
accumulate and how quickly, and tracking how many ‘friends’ they shared in
common with other ‘friends’,” [Olivia Ma] said.
Hilary Thorndike, a schoolteacher who graduated from Harvard in 2005 and
still uses Facebook, has more than eight hundred friends on the site. “I always
find the competitive spirit in me wanting to up the number,” she wrote in an
e-mail.
Williams (2005) underscores this narrative of accumulation:
Seabron Ward, 19, a student at the University of Colorado at Denver, said that many students consider it a status symbol to build a big friend list. ‘This one guy on my list has a thousand,’ she said, a bit enviously. ‘I only have 79.’
so while the gaming element explains why we’re all addicted, the problematic political economy of facebook is what makes us hate it.
Tags: myspace, worldofwarcraft, wow, facebook, web2.0, thesis
May 27, 2006
i’m moderating a panel on monday about web2.0 and development issues at a conference run by netsquared. happily, the conference is suitably web2.0 compliant and buzzworld enabled which means, of course, you can all participate online!
i’ll be asking questions that are submitted to the conference site so if you have any interest in ict4d, development issues and web2.0 please post! (select “developing world” as the session to send it to my panel” w00t)
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