[Air-l] how to pin down web 2.0

Sat Apr 21 23:04:04 PDT 2007

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 at 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:

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