Web 2.0 is Broken and Here’s Why

People who study the Internet for a living have expended a good deal of effort arguing about its impact on the democratic process. Ever since Web 1.0 came along and changed the world, a popular line of argument has gone roughly like this: ?cyberspace allows people who possess relatively little power in the so-called real world to have their political voices heard in a more egalitarian manner on the Internet.? While the social promises made by a lot of Web 1.0 designers, promoters, and users never fully materialized, I submit to you here that there was actually a lot more democracy to be found in the first web then there is now.

In the future, archaeologists digging deep into the Yahoo Way Back Machine will marvel at the democratic possibilities latent in those ugly, early webpages; graduate students will argue correlations between the number of animated .GIFs on a site and the amount of political empowerment that accrued to its creators.

How can I be so nostalgic for something as naff as Web 1.0, when the toys we have now seem so much shinier and more exciting? Well, although Web 2.0 makes grandiose claims in a number of areas (to free us from consolidated corporate media, to provide us with a greater sense of community, to tailor content specifically to our tastes) it actually fails to deliver on most of its promises. That is not to say that the web can?t be made into something that achieves all of these things, simply that it is broken in its current form. Here?s why.

1. Social news aggregators display a remarkable homogeneity in terms of political viewpoints

Try the following handy-dandy quiz to see where you fall on the Web 2.0 political spectrum:

Who wants to come over to my house and play
A) Ps3
B) Wii

Hey, did you see the new update for
A) Internet Explorer
B) Firefox

Democratic candidate for president?
A) Hillary
B) Obama
Last-minute write-in choice) Mike Gavel

Republican candidate for president?
A) Rudolph Giuliani
B) Ron Paul

The government can…
A) raise taxes on widgets to pay for inner-city schools
B) pry it from my cold, dead hands

I think you can see where I am going with this.

Many social news aggregators purport to offer users a sense of participation, when in fact they are nothing more than platforms for a crude kind of representative democracy in which users vote for the ideas that they find most appealing and bury the ones they don?t. One major problem with representative democracy, of course, is the tyranny of the majority. (And like a tyrannosaurus, this majority has very clear motives and tastes. For example: meat). If you answered any of the above questions correctly, you might find yourself at home on Digg, the big daddy of the social news aggregators. Remember, they are called aggregators for a reason: they filter and aggregate the news into a consumable pellet, which has an agreeable flavor and consistency for a particular audience. Don?t worry if you answered the questions wrong: a million new niche sites are popping up to fill the void. But somehow that doesn?t feel so communitarian anymore, does it? The sad truth of the matter is that in social bookmarking we have one of the most powerful communicative tools in the history of humankind at our disposal and the best ideas we have come up with so far are making fun of the mentally challenged and getting the word out about how to pirate HD DVDs.

2. 1,000,000 monkeys at a keyboard is still a warehouse full of monkeys

Even if the endlessly resourceful developers behind Web 2.0 find a way to overcome the impulse to majoritarianism in social bookmarking, we still have to contend with the question of whether a fully democratic media is necessarily a good thing. For every insightful blog on MySpace and LiveJournal, there are 100 more pre-pubescent diaries full of l33tspeak and virtual bling. I might be showing my age here and thus missing some important underlying social purpose in this adolescent wankery, but suffice it to say that I think we get more civilizational worth out of the folding@home project than we currently do from all of the social networking sites put together. It?s not just the wide, fat bottom of the web 2.0 user base that experiences this problem, either. Even the venerable Wikipedia has been rocked by a series of revelations that serve to undermine its legitimacy ? and more fundamentally, the viability of user-generated content.

Like the poor and the insane, spammers will always be with ye. And the spammers have taken a shining to the horizontal architecture of Web 2.0. If their devious plan to substitute all user-generated content for cynical linkbait ever comes to fruition, we can expect to start consuming all of our news in the form of top-ten lists that link back to affiliate marketing sites containing nothing but ads for Cialis and Arizona real estate.

3. Is the solution really MORE capitalism?

Let?s not deceive ourselves into believing that the Web 2.0 movement is divorced from the capitalist forces that helped to transform the first web into the profit-making engine that it ultimately became. There is big money to be made in Web 2.0 applications, despite the fervency with which designers try to conceal this fact from users. There was something comforting about the fact that in Web 1.0, you knew when somewhat was flagrantly promoting a product or service. Now the line between community members, consumers and vendors is less clear. The miracle of Web 2.0 is that Internet entrepreneurs have now found a way to generate content for free, using the collective goodwill of a million web surfers, each one believing that they are participating meaningfully in a virtual community. This is the most audacious and yet utterly brilliant business model devised since P.T. Barnum invented the art of crowdbaiting. Do you see that grin on Kevin Rose?s face? It could have something to do with the fact that his company is worth an estimated $200 million. Forget learning to play the guitar folks; Web 2 developers really do get their money for nothing and their chicks for free.

While it may seem as though the sole purpose of this article has been to drag the concept of Web 2.0 through the mud (ok, maybe it was just a little), my actual goal has been to highlight some of the issues that currently hinder the web from reaching its full social potential. In the spirit of openness, community betterment and debate (some of the most admirable features of the Web 2.0 community), I offer these observations in the hope that by talking about them, we can start to devise some creative solutions.

Images courtesy:
“Revolution” photo - Andy Denton
Kevin Rose Cover photo from Business Week

Kris Erickson is a starving student and a member of the Society for the Preservation of Animated GIFs. And yes, he does recognize the irony in whoring himself out for an iPhone so he can call up Kevin Rose for a job.