Web 2.0 and Internet Historicity
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Draft paper (not for citation):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