my personal view in this discussion is that internet research needs to take a look at the political economy of web 2.0. sure there are business interests involved in web 2.0 that have advanced and will advance its evolution. this interest might be a reaction to the dot.com crisis at the end of the millennium which caused an overall fall of the profit rates of informational capital. whenever capital enters crisis, it tries to develop new strategies for accumulation. this might have been a great influence for the emergence of web 2.0. web 2.0 contains a whole new strategy of accumulation that i term the capitalist gift economy - accumulating capital by giving free access and digital gifts to the users. web 2.0 is social just like web 2.0, but it is more social because it involves more co-operation efforts and possibilities than 1.0. surfing a web 1.0 webpages is social in the durkheimian sense of the term social facts, but it is not social in the sense of max weber's social relations. communicating or co-operating on a web 2.0 platform is social in both senses - the structuralistic and the action-theoretic one. i sometimes feel that internet research really lacks a whole lot of social theory, in this case it is obvious. in the political economy of web 2.0 an antagonism emerges: advancing co-operative social relations by web 2.0 might undermine the dominant competitive and individualistic (i.e. based on private property) model of society and strengthen co-operation and participation in overall society. so by advancing web 2.0 in order to gain particularistic economic interests (profit) and advancing the instrumental reason immanent in capital, informational capital advances the socialization of the economy towards more co-operative modes of production and interaction and hence (without knowing it) undermines its own competitive conditions of existence. i think this is the really important aspect about the political economy of web 2.0. i try to explore this aspect in my publications (cf. "internet and society" published later this year by routledge) and try to link it to marxian thinking: web 2.0 is nothing else than a contemporary reformulation of the antagonism of the productive forces and the relations of production (formulated by marx more than 150 years ago). thinkers like castells and zizek agree in this respect that hence we need certain aspects of marxian thinking for understanding the internet today. i would add that we also need a whole lot of social theory for coming to grips what web 2.0 is, how it has changed society, etc. christian Hugemusic schrieb:
Alexis wrote:
So, yeah, maybe things started out that way, but by its very nature, doesn't Web 2.0 just scream to corporations to look at it - after all, what more could an investor want than to know, up front, that millions of customers are clamoring for a product? By its very collaborative nature, any remotely succesful Web 2.0 "product," "service," or "platform" is going to ask to become corporatized, because it already has a devoted community. Or customer base, if your eye is bent to looking at it in those terms. Corporations take what's good about 2.0 and twist it to their own ends. At the end of the day, then, you may be part of a community and enjoy all the perks therein, but the food's provided by McDonald's. -Alexis
Spot on, but that's because the *term* Web 2.0 was created as a branding strategy for corporations to exploit the *phenomenon* of Web 2.0, which did not have a neat brand until it was given one (and arguably still doesn't). The term is shorthand and doesn't fit neatly with all examples of what various people would call Web 2.0 sites -- but the term's primary purpose was to create a label for something that began organically but (like most socially successful things) was becoming commercially significant. Not everything that could be described as "Web 2.0" has any real commercial significance, but if the handle fits and you want interest, it's a useful lever for gaining attention.
Also, there's the very real prospect that commercial involvement will destroy the very fabric of many Web 2.0 efforts. I'm still sure (but less so than I was) that Murdoch is going to destroy MySapce in spite of his own best efforts. He's nearly done it already and it was only the founders who saved him. Time will tell.
The point being that it's essential to separate the phenomenon of Web 2.0 from the sloppy and hyped use of the term Web 2.0. The two are not necessarily the same thing and mean different things to people with different intentions ...
Cheers, Hughie
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-- -- _____________________________ Univ.Ass. Dr. Christian Fuchs Assistant Professor for Internet and Society ICT&S Center - Advanced Studies and Research in Information and Communication Technologies & Society http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at University of Salzburg Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18 5020 Salzburg Austria christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at Phone +43 662 8044 4823 Fax +43 662 6389 4800 Information-Society-Technology: http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at/fuchs/ Managing Editor of tripleC - peer reviewed open access online journal for the foundations of information science: http://triplec.uti.at