Matthew Allen

I recently organised a symposium at Curtin University entitled Broadband in Society: International Perspectives and Research Challenges. The symposium was held to mark the formation of the BroadBand Research Team, involving several international researchers all with a particular interest in the social and policy dimensions of emering high-capacity, fast broadband networks such as Australia’s National Broadband Network.

My presentation, entitled Broadband in Australia: commonplace but why? considers the extent and significance of the Internet connectivity in this country, especially since most people have some kind of a broadband connection, and also looks at the importance of understanding the relationship between mobile and fixed connectivity.

I recently attended an excellent presentation by Catherine Middleton at the Australian Media Traditions conference at which she discussed the contradictory positions of the Government and the NBN Co on the way in which we might understand the difference that the National Broadband Network will make. Her paper was entitled, “Have We Ever Needed a Killer App? What could the NBN learn from the 1990s?”. Here are some notes, with a few asides from me.

Middleton begins by reminding us of the importance of the rhetoric of the “killer application” in the policies and plans of broadband development. She notes that, often, this “killer app” is located in the future, still to arrive but promised or imagined.

Broadband networks were initially understood as delivering content to people in a manner like television; but the alternative perspective which Middleton’s research has clearly demonstrated is that the broadband is a network – in effect, broadband is its own killer application, infrastructure to enable connectivity and user-based activity. Her problem is that the Autralian government promotes the NBN as infrastructure, as a network, but the NBN Co is building a model which implies content delivery.

Recounts the history of trials for broadband in the mid-1990s in the USA which concentrated on interactive TV, TV on demand and so on – these trials were seen as failures (as Time Warner concluded, however, the failure was one of the economics – insufficient demand to justify the investment). Killer application blurs with ‘compelling content’ – that the content is the application. However, as Middleton discovered, the story being told by the individuals connecting was different to that of the providers. The providers had not understood exactly what connectivity would do – evident in the reflections of providers who were ‘surprised’ by the importance of email. Another perspective was a provider saying it was ‘arrogant’ to assume that people want information pushed at them.

This resonates with my own arguments relating to the different understandings of how the Internet might ‘arrive’: telecommunications and media providers were strongly oriented towards a model of the Internet in which they, not users, played the determining role. In fact, the Internet as it developed, relocated the power to determine utility to the user. The internet that I claim was ‘the future-in-the-present’ was precisely a network where users’ social interconnectivity through information exchange was the primary experience of network connectivity

Middleton emphasises how content is central … but not as a given, as a contested space about the economics of exploiting content – who creates it, who circulates it and who benefits from it. Providers, not surprisingly, saw themselves as the owners of the only legitimate content.

Equally, I believe, telecommunications companies did not understand that communication would be textual, distributed and not real-time circuit-switched.

Middleton returns to the NBN, noting how the current rhetoric of the NBN is similar to that the 1994 Broadband Services Expert Group

I would add that of the 2001 report on Broadband]. It therefore implies that there is something of a return to the past, a recouping of the ideals which had first inspired the BSEG and similar thinking: but which was never realised through both failures of infrastructure development but more importantly the success of the Internet as it actually developed.

The government rhetoric is that broadband is understood as an investment in services, as an infrastructural multiplier of the investments in other areas (health, education) – that the NBN will leverage that investment, just as those investments also make the NBN sensible. The NBN cuts costs, but also improves outcomes. But, the rhetoric from elsewhere, often read off the plans of the NBN Co but also through the retail service providers’ assumptions, is a re-invention of the plans from early 2000s for the high-speed Internet as telephones and television via IP.

I would probably add a third perspective: I am not entirely sure that the ‘infrastructure’ model from the Government is that different to the content/communications model of the NBN Co which mimics the roll-out of cable for cable TV. This third perspective is that of users who are not currently connected; or which connection that maximises the immediacy and distribution within the home of connectivity – effectively more connectivity. In essence, the challenge is that the size of the investment does not match the perceived benefits of connectivity.

Essentially, Middleton concludes that there is a disconnection between the policy and developmental rhetoric (Government and NBN Co). She notes the difficulties of the current political climate within which the Opposition is critical of the NBN precisely because there is no compelling story about the difference that this massive (and world-leading) investment will make.

Middleton argues that the pay-tv approach might be the ‘leader’ to get people connected who then will discover all the other things that can be done online. But in Australia may not work because there is a significant number of people who have chosen not to connect for Pay TV.

Ultimately, Middleton concludes, there needs to be a new way of thinking about the way broadband is understood, outside of the competing rhetorics of ‘content delivery’ and ‘social infrastructure’.

In questions, Middleton makes the excellent point that the political messages needed to manage the contests over the NBN are simple and simplistic: that the faster speed justifies the investment.

Gaining a Past, Losing a Future: Web 2.0 and Internet Historicity

Paper presented at 7th Australian Media Traditions Conference: Trends, Traditions & Transformations, Melbourne Australia, November 2011

This paper considers the emergence of the historicity of the Internet – that is, the explicit sense with practical consequences that the Internet has a history, and that it exists within a history which, through our use of it, also defines us as beings in time. For many years, the Internet existed as a kind of cultural future-in-the-present. For example in the 1990s, talk of the ‘Internet frontier’ was a metaphor to give cultural substance to this new and inexplicable space called cyberspace. But it was also a temporal metaphor: the frontier was the future, as much as it was a place. The alterity of the Internet, where people found freedoms not imaginable in ‘the real world’ was also an alternative time, a world of future possibilities, made real through the magic of networked computing. The Internet might have had a history, but it had no historicity. That has changed because of Web 2.0, and the effects of Tim O’Reilly’s creative marketing of that label. What can we make of the last decade of the web, which has in popular commentary, clever marketing, and actual socio-technological development, become a second version of the web we had in the 1990s? What are the consequences of coming into history for the Internet? How might Web 2.0 inform us of the way the Internet is culturally constructed through changing patterns of relations of past, present and future?

Draft paper (not for citation):

Gaining a past, Losing a future: Web 2.0 and Internet Historicity

Just attended a great panel at the AoIR conference Internet Research 12.0 -  performance and participation. Three quite distinct papers on politics, discussing norms of behaviour in online forums, the avoidance of news during election campaigns, and the digital divide and why it is so hard to achieve universal service.

Reflecting on the three papers together (Fa Niemei,- http://snurb.info/node/1598 , Ericka Menchen-Trevino – http://snurb.info/node/1599 and Susan Kretcher – http://snurb.info/node/1600   blogged by the excellent Axel Bruns (@snurb_dot_info)), I am reminded that at its heart the Internet is a platform for conversations (diverse, stupid, brilliant, failed,sustained, confusing, enlightening all at once). What emerges from the conteporary use of the mainstream broadcast media is an almost wilful pursuit by opinionaters (that most normal form of contemporary journalism, with some notable exceptions) of communicative irrationality. Rather than the seeking of a communicative moment in which differences are aired and understood so that the differences between people become the basis for their connections with one another (I understand you think diffrently, so therefore I become more at one with you) – which for me is the essence of communcative rationality – the media creates a space which divides people from one another and requires instead allegiance to the opinion of the moment. Our social relations are emptied out and we form instead relations with half-truths masquerading as the truth. It is a form of knowledge fetishism, I guess. The truth object becomes the fetish object of our desire to belong and be heard and be knowledgeable.

Communicative irrationality deliberately excludes the diversity of opinions necessary for the operation of democracy: not because each voice is equally worthy or should be enacted in some policy or plan, but because the multitude of voices speaks the landscape of the polity. Communicative irrationality is quite literally the closing of doors in the faces of those whose opinions deviate from the accepted view. And while contemporary media (such as Fox News) practises this form of exclusion everyday (ref: punk band Bad Religion) it probably commenced with the political leaders such as Bush and Howard who created a closed world of policy and advice drawn from the sources which aligned already with the aims and expectations of the two conservative administrations which have so dominated the polities of the countries I am most familiar with in recent years.

In essence, politics can only now occur through conversations between people, mediated yes, but not by and through the ‘media’ as we might aggregate that social formation of institutional news/information/production/distribution. We hear about the death of the newspaper, and the end of the mass-audience television channel – but what we might hope for is the death of the undebated, opinionated, non-commentable ‘news’ which they tend more and more to circulate, whose primary audience is most likely the politicians whom this ‘news’ institution seeks to depose or retain.

In its place, the online spaces for conversation (which are not an ideal form of course) will proliferate I hope. How do we make sure these spaces  – where norms of behaviour are contested and politics is enacted at a micro-level – might become connected to a different form of polity which is conceived in more local terms and is not dependent on the election of one or other political party whose success and operation requires them to continue irrational communication?

Disclaimer: liveblogging

Nicholas Proferes, “Oh, the Ethics You’ll Know”

Analysis of research ethics from the Air-list – using nvivo. Ethics is a strong component of the air-list discussion. When is something public? Private? Both? Are author intentions important? What about context in which originally published? Note the link between ethical debates and new platforms/ technologies. Importance of graduate students in stimulating debate. Problem of using analog analogies: nuance of digital realm lost? There is a challenge to make space for new approaches to ethics.

Outstanding – Dr Seuss is honorary member of AoIR from now on

Alex Leavitt, “How I Saved An Internet”

Looking at Encyclopaedia Dramatica – archive of digital subculture. Assumption of net researchers is that the space / place we visit online sort of ‘stays there’. But it is not that way. Leavitt found that ED was completely deleted one day. And Oh Internet was created in its place. (but along the way, all the wiki edits which Leavitt was studying were lost). Nice contrast of ephemera vs visibility. Leavitt restored the wiki from oblivion (not always without complaint). Importance of researchers’ relationship to the objects they study.

Clever, researchers serve and protect the Internet

Janet Salmons, “See Change: the Visual in the Virtual Interview”

Importance of move from text to image in culture because of the Internet. Must questions be posed with words? Or indeed should they be answered in words? Nicely drawing on the depth, complexity and multi-dimensional form of the image which distinguishes it from words. Visual elicitation stimulates interview subjects to respond. Nice – idea of mind-map as stimulus for interviewee responses. In an online interview, a white board can be used to create visuals on the fly.

Excellent: lots to think about here because images say so much, but quickly – overcoming major challenge of interviews

Susanna Haas Lyons, “Flexing Facebook’s Civic Muscles ”

The enormous amount of people on Facebook really matters. What however are the dos and don’ts of mobilising Facebook for public deliberation for civics. Important implication – recruitment of participation is done in part through the extent of reach in Facebook. App used to create the engagement space. Nice, but also limited. “Discuss, Propose, Promote” – excellent empowerment of users by making them also responsible for building support for particular promotion. Participants have lower privacy concerns. While Facebook is not totally representative, a combination of Facebook with other methods can work. Asynchronicity of participation important. “Learn from fails”

Good presentation: liked the focus on taking risks to experiment with what works.

Stuart Shulman, “The bin Laden Post Mortem Tweets”

Focus is on crowds. Notes that political scientists did not see it coming –that there would highly charged political action from the crowd, powered by social media. Can you harness the power of the crowd to do large-scale text analysis in academia? To make the money go further, or do things which cannot be afforded. Crowd-sourced analysis of OBL tweets. There was an especially interesting approach relating to humour in the tweets. 26 people, $750 cost. Simple coding of the humour-value of tweets.

Humour does make a difference: opening our minds to new thinking – great research method.

Brian Hughes, “Super-charging Creative Teams with Negative Feedback”

Importance of negative feedback – but it is not placed on line…except by their friends! Creative teams need to be kicked sometimes. Make it personal – people need to feel disappointed. It has emotional strength – hard to get, but also hard to give. Reasonable. Thoughtful – there has to be thought involved, so it is complex. Easier to give NF to a team. Coaches and mentors are better placed to give negative feedback. Share the vision, criticise the methods. And the feedback might come in a roleplay environment.

Solid, clear and direct: no reason to give negative feedback on this one!

Richard Smith, “Doing It Right: Professional Digital Media Education”

Distinguishes professional education from research-led education. Four universities own this degree. Digital media here means ‘interactive design’. How can students create digital media experiences?  – address a need, serve a problem – real-world focus. Teamwork is central to the degree. Some of the material learned is about teams – e.g. project management. Importance of who this is for – the user, the users’ stories and expectations. Humility matters – as does courage and curiousity. And reflexivity makes a difference. Teams fundamentally depend on trust and individuals need passion. Note professional educational needs – importance of limited residency, compressed program to suit needs of people already working. Professional development is a future goal.

I like the way that the team and the task is central to the pedagogy here.

Ericka Menchen-Trevino, “The Future of Internet Research Methods:  Combining Real-World Observation & Self Reports”

There are challenges in bringing everyday life into the lab – it is too artificial. The data from companies is, while extensive, shallow. So, create some software that will acquire the rich content of individuals’ uses of the web for news consumption. Clever use of proxy server for data collection. But combined data with interviews. An interesting question: recruitment. Cragslist! Would it seem creepy to ask a person about their habits in searching and reading online. Not really. Crucially, the ‘overuse’ of media which is reported is now solved because there is evidence which can be used to prompt people who might have forgotten what they have done online.

A little challenging to consider the recording of use, but perhaps that is a sign of people’s pleasure at being research subjects? Great software idea.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “The Social Life of Scholarship”

Hilarious – a book on the falsehood of the ‘death of the book’ was written, but could not be published! Average sales of humanities books? 400 over lifetime – and most to libraries. So perhaps a book that is dying is this form. It does however conflict deeply with the scholarly futures of people. Importance of other forms of publication such as blogs which are vibrant and reach people more deeply. The problem is, always, credit: blogs are not creditable for jobs and productivity because of a lack of peer-review. Peer review = gate-keeping, to create enforced scarcity. In fact, we need to move to an economy of abundance in scholarly communication.

Brilliant – she nails it, and the problem is truly the move from scarcity to abundance.

New Challenges in Education: Online learning, knowledge networks, ‘edgeless’ universities

Kennesaw State University, 6 October, 11.30 am KSU Center (Room 300).

I will be visiting Kennesaw State U shortly to present on e-learning, Web 2.0 and changing nature of education on 6 October, courtesy of Dr Keith Herndon, the university’s Institute for Global Initiatives and the Department of Communication, and the Technology Association of Georgia.

Abstract

Online learning has been part of the provision of university education since the emergence of the internet. However, in recent years, there have been more intensive efforts to marry together traditions of university learning and academic excellence with the flexibility and creative possibilities of online delivery. This paper summarises the benefits that Internet-enabled learning has brought to distance and off-campus university education in the past decade or more, noting that Australia has a rich history of distance education. The paper also explores the way in which the so-called Web 2.0 revolution in online affairs has, to some extent, created a false sense of novelty in online learning. Nevertheless, Web 2.0, with its emphasis on social media and user-generated content, has made a difference and opens up new approaches to learning. The paper concludes by exploring some of the new challenges and opportunities for educators and institutions when seeking to harness technologies for online learning, especially given the growing dominance of knowledge networking in contemporary society.

Paper

New Challenges in Education

Speaking in a couple of weeks at the Internet Research 12.0 conference ‘Performance and Participation’

My paper, Web 2.0 from the ground up: defining the participatory web in its own terms, is based on an analysis using Leximancer of 750,000+ words used to describe 12,000+ Web 2.0 applications. Some of the fun I am having includes generating dubious yet intriguing infographics….

However, I am still struggling to find the right way to explain how I get from this to what I seek to conclude, concerning the way the discourse of Web 2.0, very much a language of computing, is now reshaping our sense of self.

A cloud of concepts defining Web 2.0 generated from Leximancer abalysis

This presentation, given at the Oxford Internet Institute May 4 2011, is a reduced version of a paper of the same title that includes substantially more examples and all appropriate references. Please refer to this paper for a full account.

What was Web 2.0? [ full paper]

Introduction

In 2008, the journal Fibreculture published an issue entitled “After Convergence” exploring questions of human, social and technological connectivity within a world where computer networks had led to the convergence of formerly disparate cultural practices. In describing the several contributions to the issue, the editors wrote:

we have asked not only what makes ‘2.0’ distinct from ‘what came before’ but also how it will be understood in the future. We ask this question not least because we are somewhat alarmed by visions of proliferating version control as 2.0 merges with 3.0 and 4.0 looms on the horizon (Bassett et al.)

My paper, in general terms, takes its lead from this critical interest in things ‘2.0’, focusing specifically upon Web 2.0. I will outline the way in which the emergence of Web 2.0 brought to the web the discourse of versions. A history created in versions, a particular form of an object’s history, required that, as well as Web 2.0, there had to be as Web 1.0 and of course presupposed the emergence of Web 3.0. The articulation of one depended, explicitly or implicitly, on the others.

Is Web 2.0 dead?

Web 3.0 labels many trends in the development of the web that might presage a ‘new’ time involving such ideas as the Semantic Web, both systemically and in specific application; new investment opportunities; and even new scholarly critiques and theories. So, perhaps it is time to ask: “Le Web 2.0 est-il mort?” (Lequien). Far and wide across the web, the phrase Web 3.0 yields a vast array of returns from search engines whether they reference marketing slogans, political commentary, technical discussions or techno-evangelist opinion.

Yet the discourse of Web 3.0 bears an uncanny resemblance to the rise of Web 2.0: different in time, not substance, and marked by the same jumble of competing, but inherently irreconcilable, differences of perspective and purpose as people position themselves, their technologies, and their ideals in relation to what has come before and what might come in future. In such circumstances, the real questions to ask, then, are:how did the web come to have versions in the first place; what is the discursive process by which these versions come to make sense; and what is revealed by analyzing this history of versions?

Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 – continuity or change

Around the start of 2006, Web 2.0 became the principal way to describe the then-current web rather than being a term which looked towards an as-yet unreached future. Yet several businesses and web services thought exemplary of, or essential to, Web 2.0 date from much earlier times, as do the technologies on which they rely. Examples include blogging (Blogger and Livejournal), distribute payment services (Paypal), crowd-sourced, user-generated content (Wikipedia), social networking (Sixdegrees), and algothrimic search and associated marketing (Google).

Equally, behaviours and sensibilities which have for several years regularly been discussed in terms of Web 2.0 pre-date its origin and extend back beyond the web itself. It has been claimed that:

… the essential difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that content creators were few in Web 1.0 with the vast majority of users simply acting as consumers of content, while any participant can be a content creator in Web 2.0 and numerous technological aids have been created to maximize the potential for content creation. (Cormode and Krishnamurthy).

The visibility of such behaviours in earlier Internet times suggest it would be less clear that Web 2.0 created this change but merely promoted it. Examples from before the web include USENET, bulletin boards, email lists, chat environments, and MUDs, all demonstrated the founding basis of socio-technological networking: people wished to share information, create content and work with others in doing so. The World Wide Web did not mean an end to these earlier forms, but enabled a rapid increase in their utility and visibility; there was also significant website creation and curation by individual users and the concept of the ‘webring’ emerged to enable networks of users and authors to emerge.

These examples stand in contradiction to the current ‘history’ of Web 2.0, which generally views the technologies, businesses and social formations of the past several years as initiating and making possible an online world of participatory, user-generated and open content and communication. Of course, the point is not that this current history is wrong: histories are not wrong, per se, but contingent on the circumstances and purposes of their creation and circulation and current contestations are fought out through, rather than by reference to, historical accounts.

Juxtaposing examples which suppose a continuity of development online, with a dominant history of Web 2.0 as radical transformation allows us to look more deeply at the cultural complexity of the notion of ‘version’. The idea of versions is becoming a cultural commonplace of today’s world because of the rise of computing: the conventions of software development are coming to play a critical role in the consumption of goods and services dependent on digital technology. While it is not new for goods and services to be promoted and sold on the basis that they replace what came before (for example, a new model of car or washing machine), it is definitely the case that, in computing culture, consumers are now receptive to the idea of purchasing something which they know will be replaced in a short period of time by a new version and willingly enter into this transaction, becoming part of the development cycle as much as being its recipients. Consumers accept, if reluctantly, that the digital products they are not entirely finished, and will be regularly ‘patched’.

These points are not merely a comment on current software marketing: they reveal the semiotic work that the discourse of versions can do. Versions allow products to claim to be new, but not threateningly so, because they also sustain continuity and promise an easy transition from that which came before. At the same time, versions allow new products to derogate earlier incarnations of themselves as limited or otherwise demanding of replacement. Through this duality of appeal, a discourse of versions both reassures consumers that they were right to buy the product first time around, but must now, of course, consume again and not rely on what they had already bought. Ultimately, the fetish object for consumer gratification becomes the process of upgrading, rather than what is possessed after that act.

Perhaps, then, technology might legitimize the move to a new, second version of the web while also sustaining continuity? Code within Web 2.0 is more sophisticated and enables developers and users to do far more; and in many different ways. Yet many Web 2.0 sites do not demonstrate technological sophistication, nor rely on innovations in code. Further the importance for the computing industry of shifting the way we think of the Internet from channel (media discourse) to platform (computing discourse) cannot be understated as a rationale, and implies technological change is consequential to a more fundamental commercial re-orientation. Thus, as Berry has argued, the insistence on technology as a discriminator between Web 2.0 and things other, is more of a demand for what ought to be, rather than an objective description of actual change. Further if technology is to authorize the legitimacy of claims for a transition to Web 2.0, then necessarily technology is presumed to determine or at least substantially control the consequences and meanings of that change.

Not all explanations or discussions of the transition to Web 2.0 relied on appeals to technology, however. We can contrast contemporary commentators Schauer and Hinchcliffe who argued respectively that new behaviours emerged because of technological development, or that the traditional behaviours became influential because of the large number of regular Internet users which the web created. In both cases however, these authors but demonstrate a fundamental tension within the language of Web 2.0: the need to manage the transition between versions, to explain the 2.0 which both ‘breaks’ with the past, and also connects to it. This tension is not easily resolvable because, in truth, the tension is what gives ‘versions’ their semiotic cogency.

Yet, without an articulation of change and continuity between ‘then’ and ‘now’ there could be no rationale for Web 2.0 and thus, even as this form of the web was proposed as novel, it had to be presented as less than novel. Throughout the texts of Web 2.0, simple dichotomies of new and old are presented hand-in-glove with the assertion of a contradictory, more developmental path from earlier times, often within a few short sentences of such assertions. While popular advice might be that “The definition of Web 1.0 completely depends upon the definition of Web 2.0.” (Strickland), in fact the existence of Web 2.0 depends utterly on Web 1.0. Without it, the absences and failures which Web 2.0 solves would not be knowable.

Web 2.0 and Web 0.0 – realignment to ideals

There are other ways in which the creation of Web 2.0 came to define the particular sense we have of the history of the web with strong claims that Web 2.0 returned to the origins of the web, and indeed the Internet more generally, realigning everyday technology and social practice with the ideals which had first given birth to the web. In other words, Web 2.0 was not a continuation from Web 1.0 so much as a ‘reset and restart’ returning the web to its alpha version 0. This alpha version, according to Berners-Lee, was:

a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information [and] … dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize… we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together

In this respect, the web represented ideals of social practices through network connectivity inspired by the prototypical cultural forms of the Internet As Dean puts it “Web 2.0 designates nonetheless the surprising truth of computer-mediated interactions: the return of the human”.

Within this particular conception of Web 2.0 the web needed a restart because Web 1.0 represented the failure of 1990s business. Not appreciating the web’s ‘true’ origins and seeking only commercial gain, business had imposed upon the web ideas and expectations drawn from the traditional media. Not only had most businesses involved in Web 1.0 mismanaged their own affairs pursuing the illusory goal of media convergence, but in doing so had threatened the potential of the web to transform the world. The dotcom crash showed that the reality of how and why people used the Internet was not what business had thought and thus proved the original ideals of open communication, sharing and so on were not only good, but true: “the Internet was literally given back to the people” (Raffl et al.).

Yet the emergence of Web 2.0 saw a return to speculative behaviour and commercial exploitation of the common information space:

The 2005 Web 2.0 conference reminded me of Internet trade shows during the Bubble, full of prowling VCs looking for the next hot startup. There was that same odd atmosphere created by a large number of people determined not to miss out. Miss out on what? They didn’t know. Whatever was going to happen—whatever Web 2.0 turned out to be (Graham).

Thus if Web 2.0 was a return to an earlier time, before Web 1.0, it would be marked by the same political economy as the 1990s, as part of informational capitalism and with competing forces vying to constitute the web as that particular fusion of technology and capital necessary to their commercial interests. Thus Web 2.0 could not completely ‘reset’ the web’s development, for it was intrinsically part of the competition within capital over the ways in which to appropriate the value of consumers’ attention, labour and tastes.

The particular nature of the wrong direction of the web is best understood by a specific analysis to the problem of ‘design’ and its relationship to the technologies through which design came to dominate people’s internet-mediated interactions. The importance of design is evident in the brief article of DiNucci which, in 1999, first coined the term Web 2.0, and in the opposed views of good design  of visual designers (e.g. David Siegel) and HCI experts (e.g. Jakob Nielson). Exemplifying the way the web disrupted conventions and refused easy definition of norms and standards, the debate sums up the primary techno-capitalist challenge of the 1990s: how might  media and computing combine, whether within one site, or within corporations set on paths of convergence. Yet this debate shows how Web 1.0 had diverged from the origins of the Internet, which were resolutely outside of the media, forming a space of information and collaboration that specifically did not draw on classic media forms, tropes or models. By 1995, from the corporate media perspective, rather than being a novelty suited to computer enthusiasts, the “WWW was seen principally as something you watched, rather than something you built a small corner of yourself” (Roscoe) and the source of this maturity was the imposition of media models to explain its future significance.

Hagel at the time stated that “In many respects, Web 2.0 represents a return to origins of Internet”, portraying Web 1.0 as radical discontinuity from the ‘the web’ which might have existed.  Web 2.0 could then be proposed as a further discontinuity which would undo Web 1.0. However Web 2.0 could never fully return to that time as if there had not been this misdirection. The need for the version (rather than a return to just ‘the web’) stemmed from the fact that commercialization could not be undone, and a new form and approach was required. Furthermore, a vast ‘audience’ that had developed, the users whom Berners-Lee’s idealistic vision was to serve. Their needs and expectations, courtesy of Web 1.0, were not what had be assumed in that vision. Just as Web 1.0 could be said to have failed because it did not understand the cultures of use of the Internet, so too, there was no way to reset the web without now accounting for the new cultures of use that had emerged in the 1990s.

The discourse of versions

The emergence of Web 3.0 in recent years was inevitable once Web 2.0 started to be used. It is just too easy for technology evangelists to slip into the language of versions to help communicate their messages. But, it is not just superficial talk. A move from discussing ‘the web’ to discussing Web 2.0 creates the foundations for a teleology of development legitimising what had come before, was current, and what was still to come. The emergence of one version, to replace another, ineluctably requires there to be yet another version, still to come, which in time will become current and, eventually itself be replaced. How the web came to have a history shows us that, in building this meaningful narrative, a discourse of versions works in three ways.

First, the discourse enables a return to origins, to create the legitimacy for current moves that, far from being developed from the previous version, in fact realign with a trajectory of development originally intended. The recent past is placed to one side and ‘normal’ progress is resumed. Web 1.0 becomes the repressed other, only visible because it explains the contradiction of the move to Web 2.0 from the alpha version zero. In this repression, certain key features of the Internet in society (excess value appropriation; the complex relationship of the Internet and media; and contestations within informational capitalism) are strategically obscured.

Second, a discourse of versions enables a different movement from the past into the present, whereby the recent past is normalised as creating the pre-conditions for what has now emerged. The past is overturned by incorporating it within the self of the present, not repressing Web 1.0 but adding “1” to it. Here, version zero is repressed, since the latest iteration only references that which immediately preceded it and thus helps explain away contradictions which might produce a critique of the latest version.

Third, versions create the conditions for knowing and anticipating the future in an orderly manner, managing what is to come as astutely as what has been, positioning those who control the specific meaning of each revision as the authorities on what ought to be, based on their success in modifying current reality. Web 2.0 is a part-completed project, the model for Web 3.0: thus, the reasons for current failings and problems can be safely ignored because solutions are just one step away, to the next version. The discourse of versions enables ‘erasure’ the current version, even as it speaks it, locating attention towards the version next-to-come. The perfectibility of the Internet, and along with it, the whole technocratic project that it signifies, is reassured.

Conclusion

The dominant, popular history of the web is told through versions; these versions. provide the semiotic sites at which critical debates about financial, technological and regulatory issues can be played out, in a fight to define the future, through control over the meaning of the past and the referential present. For that reason there is no single, stable accounting of the versions and what they mean: the web is not software engineering, where versions represent agreed and defined iterations of the design and coding process. Yet, the origin of versions in engineering is apt: versions create order, control and mastery over a process that might otherwise become impossibly flawed in the absence of a consensus about the history of the application or product. A history of the web told in versions is all about the way that people seek to influence the direction of future development to suit their ideals, profits, or personal ambitions but only insofar as this historical account becomes the basis for collective, or shared, understanding.

What of the other sorts of histories to which we should pay attention? Shared history of versions of the web, where periods are defined, originators and pioneers identified, and generalisations made, occludes the private, personal histories of Internet use that tell of the individual experience of connectivity and which reveal a very different kind of relationship between technology and individuals. I will conclude with two examples.

Consider the case of Justin Hall, as described by Walker:

Hall’s narration of his life online began in January 1994, with a simple homepage, and extended into a detailed hypertextual version of his life told in traditional node and link HTML. When weblogging software began accessible, Hall started using it, and posted almost daily fragments in this decade-long autobiographical project until early 2005. At this point, Hall posted a video where he discussed the problems of publicly narrating one’s life at the same time as relating to the people in one’s life, and ceased his personal blogging.

This history (and there are many more like it) stands in stark contrast to the idea that Web 1.0 was a time of static, commercially oriented content produced for a mass audience and that this inappropriate form of the web was heroically undone by the expertise (whether business or technical) of the Web 2.0 revolution, enabling people to lead social lives online. Hall can be characterized as Web 2.0 before this term existed; and returned to Web 1.0 during the time of Web 2.0.

Second, the web is effectively designed by the preferences, behaviours and interests of its users and not by software engineers (or indeed communications designers). As Millard and Ross found:

… the relationship between Web 2.0 and those original [hypertext pioneers’] visions is more complex than [expected]: many of the aspirations of the hypertext community have been fulfilled in Web 2.0, but as a collection of diverse applications, interoperating on top of a common Web platform (rather than as one engineered hypertext system)… The Web 2.0 model is heterogeneous, ad-hoc, evolutionary rather than designed…

This example suggests an entirely different history of the web, consisting in the innumerable and largely invisible minute acts by all the users of the web which, in their effects, become a crowd-sourced history and, in the end, visible only in its effects or in the recollection of the place within the crowd which any individual occupied at a given time.

Web 2.0 engendered a history of the Internet (its technologies, peoples, businesses and politics) that both depends on and asserts the primacy of the discourse of versions as the correct way to tell this history. This effective claim that the only legitimate way in which web histories can be told is with due deference to the technical language of the originating discipline is, ultimately, the most profound consequence of Web 2.0. Perhaps, if now we are asking “Is Web 2.0 dead?” we might more positively ask: what other ways might we explore the histories of the web such that users’ agency in their own historicity is more fully realized.

Disclaimer: Live blogging

Growing Knowledge: what is the future of research?

(details)

A Times Higher Education debate hosted by the British Library, featuring Matthew Gamble, David Gauntlett, Alex Krotoski, Ben Hickey and chaired by Phil Baty.

Phil Baty starts the debate: it is fundamentally about the way that IT will profoundly change the nature of research. Introduces the speakers.

Hickey

(A-level student)

Has grown up surrounded by network technologies and assumes they will be crucial at his time at university. he ponders however whether the research collaboration between people and computers might lead more traditional people to question the validity of his work because the boundaries between him as researcher and technology are indeterminate. [Cyborg researcher?]. perhaps universities, because of their traditional outlook, may hinder learning and research. On the other hand maybe technology creates too narrow a vision and the voice of experience from earlier times can shed revealing light on a problem. Points to a problem – younger people with whom Hickey spoke are largely uninterested in universities and research, seeing it as irrelevant and distanced from the real-world problems they face.

What is revealing about Hickey’s contribution is the way in which someone who have grown up with technologies of networks, intelligent agents and so on construes the role of technology in research: as something that, in effect, stands OUTSIDE of the normal practices of researchers and potentially enables research and learning directly from / with computing code, without human (academic) intervention

Gamble

(PhD candidate)

Mismatch between the potential that technology provides (connectivity, immediacy and scale) and what is current normal practice in academic research. this potential is, however, what causes the problems as well. The web might become the “invisible college” which promotes the circulation of scholarly literature outside of the norms of academic journal publishing and, indeed, the formal structures of universities.

Provides example of crowd-sourcing data analysis within Galaxy Zoo project where large amounts of data was given to many individuals online for them to do mciro-analysis of data, out of interest in the subject. discovered things which the researchers were not even aware they should be looking for.

Gamble’s critique of traditional science is important: he reveals that lurking within the technologies of network collaboration is, in fact, a deeply ideological project towards openness and altruism. Open science, while often construed as made possible through the Internet and similar tools, is more about a reaction against the institutionalised narrow and profit-oriented sciences which have emerged over the past fifty years

Notes the resistance of scientists who resist open data (the so-called “selfish scientist”) and who are obsessed with publishing, not finding things out. “Altruism is quickly beaten out of young scientists”. So, there are tools for collaboration but are not used significantly.

Concludes by calling for a different mode of publishing: it’s not just open publishing, but also publishing of data, the methods, processes, the discussions about projects and so on.

Krotoski

Discussing Web 2.0 and scholarship. Ponders the reality of such technology in the real world, outside of the world of enthusiasts (such as myself I should admit). Recounts how she spoke with phd students as they commenced their studies – almost none of them had any kind of online presence, definitely not blogging and so on. Students told her that they were discouraged by their supervisors from being online and open. They certainly were not taught about how to do it. this was, from the traditional perspective, ‘wrong’.

So, she continues, what of the future? She emphasises the validity of blogs or similar: ideas can be trialled and discussed with peers, useful self-promotion (on the basis of quality, not spin), writing becomes a habit and reflection possible. Krotoski views scientific / technological research in the USA, where this use of social media and Web 2.0 is more prominent, as being influenced by industry, who are not interested in long-term peer review publishing but rapid and iterative publishing of ideas and their development.

I wonder if there needs to be greater discrimination between types of ‘web 2.0′ use [which I had discussed with Aleks before the event, so no criticism here]. This discrimination is, pretty much, about identifying the unkown, but useful tools of the web which, probably, critics of ‘web 2.0′ use but don’t realise these tools could, from another perspective, be seen as web 2.0

K. comes back to key point: how do we trust what is online; is it valid and reliable; how can we assess that? Normal position emphasised — it’s about training people to have that capacity to assess. Baty contributes a point: traditional publishing filters the content to give it more reliability.

Gauntlett

Online publishing and distribution of information is very useful, even required, for academics. Open publishing helps the world and is ethically required; it is great, too, for academics because it makes them self-reliant. moreover, the web and similar tools makes academics public intellectuals again, rather than closeted.

scholarly publishing — from a time when distribution was very limited, and filters needed because of low bandwidth. G. has a great view on the failures of the peer-review system because it assumes reviewers are entirely uninvested in the outcome except from a rational scientific perspective. Perhaps academics can do the filtering themselves by using what is good, from their view.

Gauntlett noted he first built a website in 1997; some of the most keen advocates for web 2.0 and knowledge networking are often longer-term Internet users who, perhaps, have understood the web more from a self-creative perspective?

debate now ensues

Something of a confusion emerges from the discussion between the academics about peer review – there’s a slight problem with comparing and contrasting peer review with complete ‘openness’ (eg Twitter). In fact, the discussion might more usefully concern the reshaping of peer review so that it is more productive, in improving and expanding work in a supportive manner. One example is the peer review process of Critical Studies in Peer Production.

Question from audience regarding new kinds of research methods which the Internet might produce. — too much data produces new methods; online behaviour produces new methods; nice contradiction between Gamble enthusing about the Semantic Web vs Krotoski worried about the missing human condition.

Gauntlett makes an interesting comment — it appears that crowd-sourcing can elevate people to being partners in science (as in the Galaxy Zoo), “citizen scientists”; this is like citizen journalists and so on. I read this as another example of the meme/trope of participation and democracy which is ideally or occasionally true but, in fact, is a general mythos within which hierarchies and elites persist.

Upcoming Seminar at oii, Oxford
 
What was Web 2.0? Versions past, present, future and the development of Internet historicity

4 May 2011

UPDATE: my paper is slightly different, now that it is finished. I have concentrated more on detailing the particular way in which versions came to the web, the consequences of that, and generally exploring the way ‘versions’ work as a particular kind of (popular) historiography. I will work on the historicity stuff next!

In this paper, I discuss the emergence of the historicity of the Internet – that is, the explicit sense with practical consequences that the Internet has a history, and that it occupies a place in history which, through our use of it, also defines us as beings in time. While the term historicity has a long tradition within religious scholarship, marking efforts to determine the factual (as opposed to mythic) status of various ‘historical’ figures, I use the term with a more postmodern perspective. From this perspective it might be said all facts are myths and all myths are facts except that the politico-cultural discourses within which we know the world determine for us very clear, if contingent, boundaries between fact and myth. Historicity is better understood, therefore, as marking out that state in which the history of a phenomenon is established, and used, for particular purposes and said phenomenon is therefore experienced as having ‘a place’ in history.

For many years, the Internet existed as a kind of cultural future-in-the-present. For example in the 1990s, talk of the ‘Internet frontier’ was a metaphor to give cultural substance to this new and inexplicable space called cyberspace. But it was also a temporal metaphor: the frontier was the future, as much as it was a place (perhaps the past as well, so influential was America’s colonial history in this time). The speculative economics of the dot com boom were, similarly, a future-in-the-present, exploitation of which would (when that future actually arrived) bring untold wealth, as a bare handful of clever domain name squatters found. The alterity of the Internet, where people found freedoms not imaginable in ‘the real world’ was also an alternative time, if you like, a world of future possibilities, made real through the magic of networked computing. The Internet might have had a history (traced on Zakon’s timeline, sketched in Where Wizards Stay Up Late) but it had no historicity.

That has changed because of Web 2.0; not, so much, the technologies of Web 2.0 but the snowballing effects of Tim O’Reilly’s creative marketing of the term. There never was a Web 1.0 … until he (and we) started to discuss Web 2.0 Even then, 1.0 existed as a kind of shadow, rarely spoken but always implicit. Moreover, almost as soon as Web 2.0 had become popular, Web 3.0 was soon being used as well despite the fact that what it labelled (the semantic web) preceded Web 2.0 (see Allen, 2009).

What can we make of the last decade or so of the web, which has in popular commentary, clever marketing, and actual socio-technological development, become a second version of the web we had in the 1990? What are the consequences of coming into history for the Internet and is there another version yet to come? Or have we reached a time when all we have is ‘the contemporary web’? My conclusions will hopefully inform both our understanding of the Internet itself and give some guide to how we might research it.

(some of this has been sketched before when I presented on Historicising the Internet at the OII Doctoral Summer School in 2009).