Web 2.0 is Broken and Here’s Why
by
on July 01, 2007,
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.
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Jowers
Michael Fidler 
jiri
thanks for your insights! the polarization that happens on the web right now is really interesting. yes, we have crazy capitalism, uninteresting and timewasting so-called participation and the barely-out-of-highschool majority rulers at digg - but we also have a forum for thoughtful, caring people who are truly committed to changing the world (virtual and real). i love the flat hierarchy at twitter, i think of people like chris heuer or nancy white, places like changeeverything.ca, and i’m hopeful.
btw, would have dugg you if they didn’t make me jump through a gazillion hoops to do it. so i’m thumbing you up on stumbleupon, a social bookmarking site that encourages much more diversity.
If Web 2.0 is broken, let’s do the creative destruction thing and start thinking about Web 3.0! Why don’t you do the first draft of a democratic manifesto for Web 3.0?
Isabella - thanks for the stumble. I am glad that you are optimistic about the possibilities of certain aspects of Web 2.0… My goal obviously was not to impugn the entire movement, just certain trends that I think are not discussed in the open enough. The thing about these new “buzzwords” is that they are often long on hype but short on substance.
Phil - Thanks for your comment. I wonder if raising the banner of Web 3.0 would necessarily improve things. It seems like every time we announce a new “net paradigm”, it too easily elides some of the real social questions that remain unanswered. Given that less than half of the world’s population has regular access to a computer, I wonder how excited those people would be about another hot trend in cyberspace which has, for the most part, ignored them.
In the spirit of full disclosure, soon to be Dr. Erickson is a friend and part of my grad school cohort (albeit rather more successful at it). That said, this is a topic of some interest to me and one that I have been following, with varying levels of attentiveness, for some time. Had I never heard of him I would still have taken the time to read a similar piece.
The remark about Web 1.0 (of course only retrospectively so dubbed or recognized)is very relevant to the state of 2.0 and a host of related and intertwined issues, Net Neutrality not the least of them. It is almost reflexive for geographers and other social scientists to dismiss so-called technological determinism whenever new technologically mediated systems rear their ugly/interesting/shiny/cute heads. And indeed, 1.0 for a few years represented a blissful state wherein users were bending the medium(s)/technologies in ways not necessarily intended or foreseen.
But late-stage commodity capitalism excels at extracting and assigning exchange value — directly or indirectly — to literally anything (including, literally, the virtual). The host of software technologies and protocols that make up 2.0 is no exception. Indeed, 2.0 stikes me as being as much a hopeful marketing term for a bunch of computer mediated devices, programs and services thrown at consumers in the hope that something will stick. Turning it into a set of enabling technologies for a robust public sphere is probably a long shot at this point.
Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t and won’t try. Computer mediated communication (using communication in a very broad and catholic sense) has permeated large swaths of life for a great number of people at a seemingly dizzying pace. But it is still in its infancy. It won’t be easy and it will require vigilance and constant tinkering to come up with something that will work within the systems without being hopelessly suborned by them. It will be in fits and starts. Stuff like this piece represents a start. Use the technology systems, question the technology systems.
David’s comments suggest revisiting the short but dense Situationist tract, Society of the Spectacle. Written pre-internet, it recognized the ability of capitalist consumerism to incorporate everything, including overtly anti-capitalist doctrines, into its world view.
In particular SOC recognized that modern humans increasingly interact with images rather than directly with the world and these images become the world. “The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people mediated by images.” The internet has been promoted as an agent of mass participation and democracy but increasingly is just another vehicle for homogenization. While it allows geographically separated individuals to connect over shared interests (no fetish too rare for its own site/community), these little pockets of formerly transgressive activity are now just another set of images to be viewed.
The problem is not with the precise structure of the medium but our relationship to the medium. Does the ability to create virtual worlds erode the motivation to preserve the actual world? For many people I believe it does. Why bother with real penguins when there are animated ones right on your screen?
I must stop now before real depression sets in.
Too. Many. Big. Words….
I like that Soviet propaganda picture though, I think it captures the Digg Army nicely.
Tailored news is as scary as a hoard of home-schooled kids from Arkansas trying not to “sell you anything”. I think this article really articulates how web 2.o provides an opiate for the masses, requiring self-analysis, self-diagnosis, self-medication, and self-enclosure. It especially reveals how this self is becoming an iconic blur of marketing, cliques, and homeostatic ideologies, given that deviation from answer a or answer b results in systematic exclusion. Well written, and yes, web 2.0 blows.
Some excellent considerations offered here, although I feel that your diss on “pre-pubescent diaries” might be a little hasty. Isn’t the point (or points) of pomoism to break with the singularity of (mainstream) media and create spaces for these multiple voices. That, and these texts make excellent dissertation topics (see Danah Boyd, http://www.danah.org/)!
I am no expert on web 2.0 myself (kudos to all the naive and oblivious net users of my generation!), but a well articulated article. Go Kris!
With my limited knowledge of deep, sophisticated Internet aspects and concepts, it’s hard for me to comment on either Web. However, this article made me think of the whole situation. The Internet is quickly becoming a tremendous topic of intensive study and endless possibilities; who knows what the future holds, but hopefully the right decisions are made to keep things as good as they can be.
I love that Poster too!!
& i agree with Isabella that Digg makes ya do all this stoopid crap + personally i feel it’s full of Web1.0 Wankers*
However my first exposure to Web2.0 was Flickr - which to my mind is still the Shining Light of the Web2.0 Universe!! Fun + exciting + engaging compared to any old Web1.0 boring as all get out Corporate Websites*
Which leads me to Bloggers - there is a lot of really c0ol Blogging going on!!!! do i wanna read boring old Newspapers or watch the Bachlorette on TV - well yeah but only if Trista or Stacey Keibler from Dancing with the Stars is on!!
atanyrate thank god for Google + Firefox + all the small Web2.0 co.’s (many scooped by Yahoo!) for Freeing us all from the Shackles of Monopolistic Microsoft/POOP!!
Cheers Everybody!! Billy ;))
Peace*
There’s garbage on both old-school Web and new Web. Good old fashion reading, comprehension, and common sense will give you what you need out of both formats.
Personally I love the feedback that Web 2.0 promotes.
Wake up Neo, The Matrix has you. I know exactly what you mean. Most industry people know that web 2.0 is just marketing. Most people have know Idea what’s next (www.webkiller.net). - Now you know about the next generation of the internet that web 2.0 wish it could be.
welcome to the first phase…