Participation Literacy

My graduate work is a series of two parts: Part 1 is this Licentiate Thesis and Part 2 is the main work. The series of the two works is called Participation Literacy. The Licentiate Thesis is therefore a work in itself, but at the same time it functions as a base for the “big thing” later on. This structure seemed natural since the area I am writing about is so new that very few know anything at all about it. This called for a special structure in the licentiate thesis.

Part I – A Reading Guide is about the context of this text: my background, the texts’ own background, my approach and how the structure works. It is about the roots and the surroundings of this text. This part is short but quite essential and cannot be cut off, if my intentions are going to have a chance in the communication.

Part II – A technology based analysis of the Concept Web 2.0 is a conceptual approach to an emerging trend on the WWW. This is an analysis of something you could call a new mindset. In social sciences new mindsets are often rhetorically created, like the discourse of postmodernism vs. modernism. In some senses the discourse of Web 2.0 vs. Web 1.0 is built up in the same structure as the postmodernism discourse. The difference is that the Web 2.0 discourse is limited by its natural borders: the protocols and standards building up the ICT (Information and Communications Technology) layer of the world. The Web 2.0 discourse is also very new and immature. The participants in the discourse have just started to formulate the concept and this formulation is a critique on Web 1.0 environments. The critique is mostly implicit though, and Web 2.0 has inherited many of the negative structures of Web 1.0. First and foremost both the discourse and practises of Web 2.0 include mostly young to middle-aged western males. Since it is a about expensive technology with broadband Internet connections as the very grounds of existence, it excludes huge amounts of people with low income or people living in areas outside the “broad band belt” of the world.

Despite these problems belonging to practically all technology, I see exciting possibilities over the next decades. I will not pretend the thesis to be a detached and objective analysis. I do not believe in detached research. For me technology can never be detached. Both technology and research are ideology. See (Latour, 1998).

Finally, technoscience is more, less, and other than what Althusser meant by ideology: technoscience is a form of life, a practise, a culture, a generative matrix. Shaping technoscience is a high-stakes game. (Haraway, 1997)

Technoscience is a game, a very serious game and gaming is not a detached activity cleansed from ideology.

My aim in this part is to start a discussion of Web 2.0, in areas where the concept is not rooted yet. My target group is both the research community in large, and professionals in the society as a whole. With professionals I mean persons working in the world of education, librarians, computer specialists etc. This part is meant to be a technological analysis and the beginning of a discussion of a phenomenon in technology and society. This phenomenon called Web 2.0 will probably change our view of ICT in the years to come.

The knowledge in this Part is absolutely essential to understand the discussion in Part III. If I had not written this part, Part III had been impossible. Still, this part is written to stand for itself.

Part III – Starting the discussion about Participation Literacy is a construction based on stories in Part II and technoscience theories and methods. In this part I construct the Native Web cyborg. This figure is very much about irony and is supposed to bridge the gap between humans and technology. My cyborg figure, though, is not based on human flesh meeting the synthetic materials of technology. My cyborg figure is more about the relation between humans and the synthetic space we construct for ourselves. My figuration does not start with the assumption that technology has to be wired to our nervous system to be called cyborg. There are other strong connectors, namely the social.

This part represents the closure of the licentiate thesis and the beginning of my main thesis. I end the construction of the Web 2.0 concept and start the discussion of its complex theoretical layers. The very last section before the appendixes deals with participation literacy more specifically.