Editorial

Issue Edited by Anna Munster and Andrew Murphie

web 2.0 is a doing word.

Although Tim O’Reilly famously declared in 2005 that ‘Web 2.0 is not a technology, it is an attitude’, in 2009 it’s clear he’s grammatically incorrect (O’Reilly, 2005). Web 2.0 is not an “is”, or not only this. Web 2.0 is also a verb or, as they taught us in primary school, it’s a doing word. Here’s a list of some web 2.0 things to do: apping, blogging, mapping, mashing, geocaching, tagging, searching, shopping, sharing, socialising and wikkiing. And the list goes on. Yet as the list goes on it becomes apparent that part of what web 2.0 does, while doing all the things on this list and more, is colonise everything in the network. It seems that there is no part of networked thought, activity or life that is not now web 2.0. To draw up another kind of list, a list of ‘things’ that have been done over by web 2.0, we find: Gov 2.0, Identity 2.0, XHTML™ 2.0, Classroom 2.0, publish2 and Porn 2.0…and the list goes on. Anything can become or be 2.0 as long as it demonstrates or is affiliated with a certain set of qualities. A list of typical Qualities 2.0 might look something like this: dynamic, participatory, engaged, interoperable, user-centred, open, collectively intelligent and so on. Clearly an ‘attitude’ can go a long way.

What, then, do we call something that sits somewhere between doing, being and qualifying? That systematises, indexes and categorises, on the one hand, and yet, on the other, willfully overruns categories and enthusiastically keeps adding to its own lists of things, activities and characteristics? That is poised between what has just happened (web 1.0) and what will be about to happen in a minute, soon, or later (web 3.0, the semantic web, next web)? That seems ineffable, not quite there (attitude) yet is also everywhere (lists, lists and more lists)?

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