Participation Literacy

Sharing thoughts and information in coffee rooms, staff meetings, seminars and conferences is important, but you have to accept that our professional lives have changed. A substantial part of our work space has actually moved in recent years. It was not a long time ago my desktop contained pencils, rubbers, envelopes, heaps of papers and so on. In the middle of the 1990 it started to change. The pencils, rubbers and envelopes were conjured into my virtual desktop in the PC containing short cuts (icons) to Word, Excel, Netscape, Eudora, and so on. Now, we stand on the threshold of yet another change. The next few years our desktop is going to change enormously. Our work space is changing from using the Web for communication and information searching to really being our new office and/or life. The fact that our work environment (or tools if you like) is moving from PC applications to Native Web has more implications than most of us think. A native Web word processor is not the same as a PC word processor.

In the not too distant future, we’ll subscribe to a service without an address. That service will update a widget that finds other widgets, which make widgets for locating obscure jazz recordings. We’re not there yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Our little Web is growing up.(Saffer, 2005)

There are two words which sometimes are used in the discourse, but never in a substantial way, namely “native” and “connectable”. First of all, Web 2.0 is not hype or a bubble (I mean that in a technical sense). Web 2.0 as a core of something new, is close to the concept paradigm. It is not going to be called Web 2.0. But Web 2.0 is an extensive and important step of the development in this direction. I would like to call this future phenomenon the “Native Web”. In this era all indirect communication (including what usually is called information transfer) is born on the Web and lives there the whole life without ever leaving it. The native Web will render the words file and printout obsolete (from the consumer’s perspective). The word file is a Web 1.0 word. The word file is an icon of the era before the Native Web. The word Web is NOT equivalent with the word WWW. Today, most of our Web communication is situated on the WWW, but the word Web includes all ICT (Information and Communication Technology) layers.

What is Web 2.0? Is it group thinking (??), a mindset, a paradigm, or a meme? Is it just some fluff or is it really hot stuff? Is it an IT-Bubble or is it the Hubble? As you know the Hubble Space Telescope is positioned outside the Earth’s atmosphere which allows it to take sharp optical images of objects in the distant space. At first everyone thought is was a bubble since one of the lenses was wrongly grinded. But against all odds the NASA technicians finally managed to replace the malfunctioning lens, and suddenly the astronomers were looking into a “new” space, sharp and crisp and with wonderfully displayed details. I make this parallel trusting the reader to see the ironic beauty in it.

The Web 2.0 discussion is about semiotics. A group of people decided to call certain aspects of technology and life Web 2.0. The reason was that they saw a fundamental change in Web technology and Web thinking, beginning in the second half of 2004. They started a session to map out common features of this change. Most of these features already had a name like “collective intelligence” or Ajax. To be able to talk about these features as a group they had to give this group - or set or bundle of words - a superordinate term, a term, which did not already mean something else, a term that is strong enough to harbour the quite forceful subordinate terms. The word they chose connoted both to the software industry with their release versions and to the paradigm thought. The paradigm thought is conjured from a historical line of thinking, building on the thoughts of stages of development. Since they thought this was a new stage in the development of the Web they called it Web 2.0. Since then the concept has grown enormously. The reason for the growth is probably quite complex but would include the fact that we need bundled concepts to describe the time we live in. We cannot think without bundled concepts. The Web 2.0 word is relatively untouched. It does not have a long history filled with lurking connotations.

The concept seems to work and I would call it a meme. A meme is a piece of information which is transferred from person to person and develops in an evolution-like manner.

As with most technology related phenomena there are both possibilities and problems with Web 2.0. The possibilities and merits are:

Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence, breaking down the embodiment walls between people, and the binary between the human and the technology.

Native Web solutions might be the only way to solve the problems with digital copyright. The entity causing the problem is the “file”. Files might be obsolete in a late Web 2.0 era where information does not need to be outside the Web information layer. (This requires a good broad band connection, and that will probably exclude many people for a long time causing another problem.)

Connectivity and the long tail thought can work counter to monopoly. Services and widgets talking to each other via standard protocols and open/semi open APIs might reinforce decentralization and anti-monopoly in the digital world. Many small services connected with mashups or widgets might be as good as, or better than the big beasts of today.

Cutting off the application layer will have a profound impact on business models. If the operating system is degraded to a communication layer between hardware and the “door” to the Web, then we probably will have a greater variety of “Web Windows”. Windows, Linux and Mac could be followed by many operating systems.

There are problems too. One problem is that some people might have hard to adopt and make use of this new environment. This is the same problem we have today and it is not related to Web 2.0 or the Native Web, though this is a profound problem with all (new) technology. The most evident problem related directly to Web 2.0 thinking, is about security and privacy.

PC applications were identified by location. If PC applications were in my computer, they were mine. Web services need registration and registration leaves traces. Traces can always be followed and following traces is particularly easy in the digital world. The whole idea about participation and collective intelligence builds on those traces. Every effort to lessen the traces for security reasons will inevitably lead to container thinking. The question about privacy and security will therefore have to be solved in terms of Web 2.0. We cannot solve Web 2.0 problems by falling back to Web 1.0 thinking.