What was Web 2.0? Versions as the dominant mode of internet history, published in New Media and Society, is now available through Online First publication. This paper is one of several that I have written / am writing that attempt to explore the consequences for how we collectively ‘think’ the internet as a result of Web 2.0. Links here to the other posts. Click to read more
In this recent paper, published in Media International Australia, I argue that Web 2.0 cab be understood, not as a technology or practice, but as the marker of a discourse of historical interpretation dependent on versions, historicising the internet so that it is now understood as different from (and yet connected to) that of the 1990s. While Web 3.0, implied or real, suggests the ‘future’, it also marks out a loss of other times, or the possibility of alterity understood through temporality. Click to read more
A paper presented at the Australian Media Traditions conference exploring the historicity of the Internet through the use within discourse of Web 2.0. Click to read more
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 … Click to read more
A liveblog of a great talk at the OII by Steve Jones, founding President of the Association of Internet Researchers: Steve is musing on the way we think about Internet researchers, 40 years on. Click to read more
The first piece I wrote on Web 2.0 that started me off on a journey back into history as a mode of understanding contemporary Web 2.0 developments. In essence, I argue, O’Reilly profited from ‘control’ of the idea of Web 2.0 but that, to enjoy that control O’Reilly had also to allow differences in meaning. The paper concludes by suggesting that Web 2.0 therefore signifies a new kind of economics that brings together freedom and control in a new way. Click to read more
