Web 2.0 and Ourselves

[Nicolò Borghi]

The previous post by Jacop "The Truth According to Wikipedia", has been a great start to stimulate the conversation about the Web's impact on our society.

The main points can be summed up in a couple of questions: is the Web2.0 good or bad? What all this Web2.0 websites are really made of? Is Wikipedia reliable? and the Jacob gave us a some cool "additional material". Two documentaries (one on Wikipedia, one on Google) and the book of Andrew Keen, "The Cult of the Amateur".

It' s no easy task to say what the Web2.0 is really about and it's impossible o objectively judge if it's good or bad, so I can only express my point of view.

First: the importance of the Web2.0 is paramout since it enables a worldwide conversation with no precedent in the history. The technology standing behind the Web2.0 really changed the way we learn, we interact, we share, we show, we communicate and so on. Than of course technology can serve any use. I am sure the problem is the use we make with that technology, rather than in general "the Web2.0" and, personally, I am not seeing many people making an insane use of that technology. There are some, of course, but it's a small share.

About 600 years ago, printing (paper) was a real cool technology. But now we wouldn't blame printing because, for example, someone made a bad use of that technology and now there are porn magazines; the same techonology can be used to print school textbooks and Playboy. Is this enough to say printing

Today I do see Internet in the same way. Maybe there can be some dark little corners, but I think the overall result of "participatory sites like MySpace, Wikipedia and YouTube, which emphasize user-generated content, social networking and interactive sharing" is positive.

It's interesting that both the videos posted by Jacop are YouTube videos. I see YouTube as printing. You can use it and find a lot of bad material, but at the same time you can see great thinkers sharing their work with us. You can see author@googles (one of the channel i am subscribed to), lessons by Stanford of MIT professors, the last lesson by Randy Pausch, or access anytime historical videos and images.

I have no doubt that each of us visit Wikipedia at leat once a week. It may have some mistakes, but it' s drammaticaly rich and was design to be a starting point when we look for something. It doesn't want to be complete . For sure if you want some more information you can check other sources (but most of the times I am satisfied with what I found).

IDon' t hesistate to post about your ideas, experience and point of view...

[Corrado Alesso]

These last two post by Jacob and Nicolo' made me think about this topic more carefully. My opinions are quite controversial, often unfair, and maybe the sentence that better describes my feelings about this thing called "Web2" is "odi et amo".

To make things simpler, I prefer not to put in relation the term "Web2" with the collaborative vision of the today's Internet. I know I'm totally wrong doing this, but please read on to understand my point of view.

First of all, I have the feeling that "Web2", "Social" and the other related buzzwords are often overused and misused, just like if they are a temporary fashion, a brand, a "certification" that a product must have to be cool, up to date, interesting, and easy to sell. Actually this is not just a feeling, I work in a company quite active in the field of new technologies, web applications and so on, and "Let's do a Web2 website", "put some gradients, a bunch of javascript and a 'beta' marker", "implements facets, it's a Web2-ish feature" are sentences I unfortunately hear too often (both by technical and marketing-oriented employees). Misunderstanding and misuse of the words have the only result to lose the meaning of the word itself. This is enough for me to be skeptical every time I hear the term "Web2", and the reason why I try not ot use it (or use it, for sake of clarity, between quote marks).

With the prolification of social websites, also the informations they contains grows proportionally. When this doesen't happen, the information is spread among different-but-equals places. So the second critique I move to "Web2" is the trend to have multiple clone of the same idea. As Paolo correctly said, is better to choose than to have no choice, but is also well known than the ability of someone to correctly choose is in inverse proportion to the mumber of the possible choices. IMHO, the average "Web2-Social" website is a (big) mess (look at the image at the top of this post!). If we want to make right use of the informations we need some degree of order and ethic (with ethic here I mean not to put on the web Yet-Another-Copy of a "Web2" app if this doesn't bring a real value added to the user because this will increase the magnitute of "disorder").

As every new technology, "Web2" needs some time to become stable and widely accepted (and understood). I can distinguish:

1) a phase in which the technology is too young and revolutionary to be understood and used correctly at most of its potential
2) a phase of hype in which the technology is seen and used mostly for its business potential, with few rules
3) a phase of mess, consequences of the hype that brings a lot of thing to the market without or with very little order
4) a phase of stabilization, in which the technology is finally mature, understood and accepted by the most, used correctly

All the phases are totally natural and consequential. In my opinion "Web2" is beetween phase 2 and 3.

I simply see the 1st phase of "Web2" as the final phase of "Web1"... Now we have a deep and strong knowledge of the problematics related to the networks, we have a stable and reliable infrastructure and hardware, we have declarative web languages, web technologies and so on. What we call "Web2" is the (awaited!) consequence of a deep understanding, general acceptance and correct use of a technology like "The Web", a new brick on top of a stable wall.


Don't worry, I also have a lot of good words for "Web2"... :) What Nicolo' said is absolutely true, nowadays the Internet lets us communicate and share in a way that is a *TRUE REVOLUTION*, something that will (and I'm sure about this) influence the evolution of the mankind. Can't imagine how many people can now reach informations and culture, new theories can be proven by different teams around the world, medical opinions shared between experts, books translated in more and more languages, and everything almost in real time, or with timings totally not comparable with traditional ways of working. The global cultural level will inevitably rise, with an exponential speed, and this means, in the long time, more *culture*, more ideas, more inventions, more creativity, problems solved in a shorter time.

Free and unconditioned access to information by everyone in the world is what will save us. Our duty is to try not to taint this treasure, to keep it safe for everyone to use it.

If I had to save some websites in the galaxy of "Web2", I would choose:

Wikipedia, the brighter star. The fire, the wheel, the paper, the telegraph, wikipedia, I put them on the same level :) WP is the true realisation of the goals of the collaborative Internet, its deep meaning. Think about it, try to find a goal to "Web2"... What is it useful for? It's useful because we can share knowledge, informations, media and resources in a global and centralized way. WP is the place where all of this happen. Of course "knowledge" is not only made of facts but also of opinions, the rest of the web is there also for this. (http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i10/10a03101.htm)

Delicious, I see it as a collective human filter. Information on the Internet is growing day by day, it's difficult to imagine how fast this is happening. Hence, search engine, categorization and filtering can fail under this ever-changing circumstances. Social bookmarking put a human being behind the results, so that you can be sure that the resource you are linked to has a good quality. Google&Co. are doing very well, sometimes I refer to google as the "telepathic algorithm" because of the precision of the results even with a doubtful query, but if a human being filter these information I'm more sure about my time spent on the Internet. (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143)

So my opinion about this so-called "Web2" is: an *extremely positive* social revolution that still needs to find his way.

I haven't read yet the book by A. Keen "The cult of the amateur" but I will do for sure because the title is catching my attention and, reading the review, I'm really interested into the topics covered by the author.

Do we need authorities? Do we need filters? Do we need someone or something that can tell us what is true/good and what is false/bad? For sure we need order. With order, categorization and efficient filtering we can bring out the most from this enormous, unbelievable quantity of informations never seen in the history of our planet. We have the tool now, we MUST use it the right way (as efficiently as possible, also) or it will be a waste of time. The challenge will be to find a tradeoff between filtering and keeping the Internet the most advanced democracy in the world, as it is.