Dominic Main | 19/04/2007

In a recent article in the Australian Financial Review, IT reporter Beverly Head provides an erudite and well informed commentary on the semantic and definitional difficulties surrounding what is commonly referred to as Web 2.0.

For Head and many of the industry experts she interviewed for her article, it is determining just what it actually is that is being referred to when Web 2.0 is mentioned that is precisely the difficulty.

The article quotes author and futurist Richard Hames on the general role of technology in the onward march of globalisation, Hames’ concepts (those included in the article) are perhaps a little non-specific and indirect to help with a definition for Web 2.0.

However, the references to globalisation give an indirect strength to Head’s argument about the semantic and ideological confusion surrounding Web 2.0, because ‘globalisation’ itself is a seriously overloaded and semantically indeterminate word. In the language of literary theory – its ‘denotation’ is extremely inexact, amorphous and fluid.

What the core meaning of globalisation might be, and whether there in fact is one that can be fixed, are issues commonly contested by philosophers, historians, economists, literary critics, authors and technologists. There are different definitions for globalisation and which one you get depends largely on the ideological context of the discussion or what you are reading.

Head’s article quotes Bruce McCabe as describing Web 2.0 as “and awful term, and what it means depends on who you ask”. The intended parallel with the problematic term ‘globalisation’ is obvious here – but what is the common difficulty with both of them? The answer for both probably relates to change and scope.

The terms ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘Globalisation’ are required to function as descriptors for large, complex actualities which are changing and evolving all the time – the world (and its economies), and the World Wide Web (and its technologies).

In an effort to nail the Web 2.0 jelly to the definitional tree, Head asserts that it is interaction that is important in a discussion of the evolution of the Web. Thus she proposes the ejection of the term ‘Web 2.0’ in favour of a broader and more dynamic understanding of what is happening with the Web. This is laudable, but given the contemporary predilection of marketers for neat memorable catch-words, perhaps it may be unlikely that ‘Web 2.0’ will be elided from the vocabulary of Web marketing discourse any time soon.

In an effort to excise ‘Web 2.0’ from the discourse – or at least define it adequately - Head valiantly asserts that “the Web continues to evolve, and marketers coined the term Web 2.0 for the most recent incarnation.1” However, what actually is an ‘incarnation’ of the Web – we are back to the same definitional problem again. Head quotes technology analyst Bruce McCabe, who optimistically predicts that “five years from now, everyone will know what it means.”

However, there are multiple changing ‘aspects’ of ‘The Web’, and Head’s article goes on to acknowledge that these are embodied by both social and technological innovative dynamics.

There seems to be a constant confusion between identifying the Web as a set of technologies and technological capabilities, and defining it according to the social and communicative implications of those capabilities for users. There is what the Web is from the perspective of being something used by individual users and communities of users – which becomes inevitably part of the sphere of the social and the marketplace. Then there is what the Web is purely as an agglomeration of software and communications technologies and their concomitant functional capabilities.

There are other valid descriptions of what the Web ‘is’, but these seem to be the two that clash for ‘Web 2.0.’ Web 2.0 becomes ‘all of the new things that one can do with the Web’ as well as ‘what new Web technology can do’ – but this is changing every day based on not only fresh technological innovation but also simple innovative use of existing technology. There are new incarnations of the Web based on user innovation and other based on new technological capabilities.

In truth – both seem to be constantly evolving on the Web. Moreover – new innovations of user inspired new technology – and vice versa. For Head and McCabe, both kinds of innovation driving the ‘new incarnations’ of the Web are mainly driven by the desire for interaction.

Unfortunately, the word interaction also inspires some potential confusion – not only because it too is another overloaded English word – but because there are multiple kinds of Web interaction. There is interaction of the user with the technologies of the Web – person to ‘machinery’ (and stored information.) Then there is the interaction of persons with other persons using the ‘machinery’, including group interaction. At this level, interaction relies on the ‘machinery’, but the technology is largely abstract to the primary social objectives of the community.

For the corporate mind there is the still more specialised ‘customer to business’ interaction – which further imbues the term interaction with market dynamics.

It is interaction of the social or community variety – person(s) to person(s) – which Head sees as the innovative driver of the new Web ‘incarnation’ that is Web 2.0, and according to analyst McCabe, business is hungry to know how to “exploit those online communities”.

In an earlier blog in this series, Web 2.0 was described in terms of users having access to ‘content management system’ type capabilities that were previously only used by Web site administrators – to facilitate content inputting, updating, and bidirectional communication with other Site users and the Web site owner.

This is perhaps a solid definition of interaction from a theoretical technical perspective, with ‘content management system’ referring generically to Web technology that allows users to update and manipulate content in a Web site. The imperative for this technology shift is the satisfaction of the desire for human to human interaction using the Web – and what can be made of this desire.

References and Further Reading

1. Head, Beverly. "Interaction Defines the Emergence of the Brave New Web." The Australian Financial Review Tuesday 17 April 2007.

http://www.saxton.com.au/default.asp?sd8=1692

tags: Issues , Technology , Common Sense , Management