New Media and Society has recently published my paper “What was Web 2.0? Versions as the dominant mode of internet history”
This an Online First publication, available at http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/07/03/1461444812451567.full
The abstract is:
This paper explores Web 2.0 as the marker of a discourse about the nature and purpose of the internet in the recent past. It focuses on how Web 2.0 introduced to our thinking about the internet a discourse of versions. Such a discourse enables the telling of a ‘history’ of the internet which involves a complex interweaving of past, present and future, as represented by the additional versions which the introduction of Web 2.0 enabled. The paper concludes that the discourse of versions embodied in Web 2.0 obscures as much as it reveals, and suggests a new project based on investigations of the everyday memories of the internet by which individual users create their own histories of online technology.
This paper can be read in conjunction with other publications on Web 2.0, exploring the socio-politics of this distinct historical formation:
Gaining a past, losing a future: Web 2.0 and internet historicity(Media International Australia, No 143, May 2012)
Tim O’Reilly and Web 2.0: The economics of memetic liberty and control (Communication, Politics and Culture 42 (2) 2009)
Web 2.0: An argument against convergence (First Monday, Volume 13 Number 3, March 2008)
I am working on two final papers on Web 2.0 (since, now, it is dead), looking at the construction of the meaning of Web 2.0 through marketing of online applications and its significance in reframing the debate on online learning.
