The economic model for what is called ‘Web 2.0′ is based on promoting the desire to share and exchange things, an attempt to make profits from the voluntary collaboration of its users and its potential for compiling data and making them available to the public. The new companies operating on the Internet base their role on promoting cooperative communities and managing access to the data and files contributed. This business model increasingly tends not to sell any product at all to the consumer, but rather sells the consumer to the product, integrating the user and the files he or she contributes into the actual service being offered.

The inclusive logic of ‘Web 2.0′

The user and his or her contributions are the main content being distributed by networks. They channel and use as an economic force the desire felt by a multitude of users to be part of social networks, to share and make public their interests, to dialogue, to communicate with others, to express themselves publicly, to feel useful, and to cooperate. That is, what is exploited (if we can understand something like that happening today in the field of networks) is users’ capacity to produce sociability and their desire to do so. Now the actual user (instead of only his or her needs) is the true origin and destination of new technological developments.

The inclusive logic of Web 2.0 is based on an elementary principal: the more users there are, the better a given application or social network will be. That is, there is a value to volume. The quantitative becomes qualitative in this second stage of the Web. And since the quantitative is one of the key elements of today’s production, it is understandable that the new companies on Web 2.0 are striving to generate a need for belonging and participation, to stimulate our need to feel tied to a group, a digital community, to collaborate and contribute things to share them on the new social networks (be they videos, photographs, comments, etc.). One thing we must keep in mind is that even those people who do not want to contribute to the conformation of these gigantic collective databases will do so collaterally by using them, involuntarily increasing the value of those applications because the routes they use will be offered as orientative data for other users. For example, on many Web sites, once a user has purchased something, he or she is offered information about what products other people bought, what they were interested in, and so on. The way Web 2.0 works is based on managing to add the user to the available information. That is why it has been so often said that today, we are all turning into software components or ‘bionic software’, and that Web applications ‘have people inside them’. A recurring simile is comparing Web 2.0 to the 18th century automaton that played chess because a person was hidden inside it.[1]

The ‘input’ for the new Web is the users themselves; however, that does not mean that there is open possession of the databases they generate. Although the majority can be used freely, they are the property of the company that manages them, which also holds the rights to how they will be used in future. This has led to intense criticism, leading to the inevitable development of an intense parallel movement to the one for ‘free software’: the movement for ‘free data’.

The fact that the central axis of Web 2.0 today is the production and management of social networks proves that it brings together social and economic production. Companies on the new Web try to produce social life, human relations, in an extremely profitable strategy that does not distinguish among the economic, emotional, political and cultural. The design of forms of human relations comprises the instrumental base of production. The new businesses of today are the new economy of the immaterial.

The promotion of collective experiences of users, the enhancement of emotional interactions among participants, and making the aggregation of information originating in those networks based on affinity groups possible has required the development of huge efforts to advance in ‘social software’. This refers to software used to manage the needs and potentials of aggregating data, exchanges and communicative interactions among users in the on-line social networks.

In this respect, identifying art works as ‘social software’, which would seem to fit with what we may understand by the term ‘net.art 2.0′, would influence the idea that the most committed art practice would aim to reconfigure the ways in which personal and social interactions take place on today’s Internet Web. Of course, many of the principles of what was called more or less improperly ‘Relational aesthetics’ (Bourriaud, 2002) are found, in fact, in the area of the new networks, one of its best possible fields for future development.

Power 2.0

With the process of involvement and inclusion of individuals in economic production and subjective systems which are part of the Web, the new forms of power today are trying to organize our entire lives. In the current network society, power blends into life, becoming abstract. It is no longer exercised over individuals; instead, it circulates through them (we all more or less consciously make it circulate) with the result that it seems logical that the most effective devices for the exercise of power are based on participatory logic, on flows of social activity.

In contrast to efforts at homogenization, of treating everyone in the same way, the economic logic of Web 2.0 is based on differentiating and singling out each procedure or allowing each person to use it their own way. The goal is for there to be nothing we can be against, by offering a super-abundance of free choices and freely taken decisions. There is a proliferation of constant strategic games of personal initiatives and freedom. The system aims to correspond to the multiplicity of singularities forming the connected multitude by forcing the multitude into submission through its involuntary conversion into a transmitter of the new forms of power.

However, in this second stage of the Web, we should speak not of power but of the relations of power, given that dominion is not a unilateral relation here, but rather it operates through power plays that are mobile, unstable, based on diffuse circulation strategies and the transmission of individual initiatives and freedom.

We could even say that in the context of the new culture of digital participation, politics can only be conceived properly as the organization of social interactions. Ideally, the most appropriate political model would be that inherent to the connected multitude itself, self-organizing its interactions in the full exercise of its decision and participation possibilities. The autonomy of politics, as a notion that implies separation or representativity, would thus no longer have any meaning. This political and social model would begin to take form today in those forms of organization distributed in networks, in the multiplicity of all the connected singularities, characterized by that Spinozan thought, where beings are constituted through desire, through the pleasure of being alive.

‘Amateur’ creativity

If we look back in time to the beginning of the Internet network, the contents it offered were generated by professional suppliers who incorporated a variety of information on their Web sites, and users were essentially consumers of that information. On Web 2.0, in contrast, many service platforms such as MySpace, YouTube or Flickr, allow their users to participate in community, collaborating and sharing files, photographs, videos, etc. They even transform and re-edit them (e.g. jumpcut) in such a way that users are no longer mere consumers of information but also suppliers of contents. Therefore, ideally, Web 2.0 would be a Web ‘for’ users and also generated ‘by’ users, on the basis that any of its services improves if more people use it. Essential catalysts of this process are the large blogs for uploading photographs and videos, as well as the huge development of ‘do it yourself’ platforms proliferating on the Web.

The fact that anyone can be a producer and distributor of visual and audiovisual materials of all kinds has led to an unstoppable, intense ‘amateurization’ process of the creative practices that statistically comprise a significant part of the contents available on-line. This ‘amateurization’ is clearly a contrast to the professionalism that characterized the 20th century on all levels. In today’s world, that former concept of a given individual as the exclusive location of “artistic talent” and the accompanying suppression of that talent among the ‘great masses’ no longer has any meaning. It increasingly belongs to the past, following the extreme attenuation of all divisions of work (which Marx saw as the main cause of that suppression).

Undeniably, many hopes have always been focused on the conversion of consumers into producers of means. For Guy Debord, to cite one example, there was no possibility of freedom in the use of time unless one possessed modern instruments for constructing everyday life. Only through their use, he said, could one progress ‘from a utopian revolutionary art to an experiential revolutionary art’ (Debord, 1977: 122). Hardt and Negri proposed the conversion of the multitude into an autonomous agent of production and that could be channelled through trying to achieve free access to and control over the primary means of biopolitical production, which would also involve the production of subjective means. Those are knowledge, information, communication, and emotions which certainly constitute the primary elements of the production fabric of our time.

An increasingly minor part of aesthetic innovations occur nowadays in a professional or industrial environment. Many of those aesthetic innovations occur in the “social fabric” formed by users; that is, after industrial production (Söderberg, 2004). That is why there has been talk of an emerging process of ‘democratization of innovation’ (von Hippel, 2005), or of ‘open innovation’ (Chesbrough, 2003), related to the “customer-made” formula. It implies an active connection between companies and users in the production of goods and services. What is happening is that this way, consumers are becoming producers of certain products, which means they are both consumer and producer, giving rise to the newly coined term ‘prosumers’.

The contradiction between producers and consumers is certainly not inherent to current digital means. And while that is true for creative fields, it is even more so in information technology environments. The ‘blog phenomenon’ is clearly the best example of the emergence of massive ‘amateurization’ of the production of information and opinion. Almost all of the large information media include a section for blogs or even what some call ‘citizen journalism’ or ‘participatory journalism’. Spaces like Wikinews have proliferated, where information and articles are written by readers, and they can decide what news they want covered.

However, many people see this growing hegemony of the amateur as a danger, considering the cultural model of Web 2.0 to be an ‘oclocracy’; that is, mob rule, one of the specific ways democracy can degenerate (Keen, 2007). These standpoints rest on the suspicion that society, though it has all the media at its disposal, has nothing to say, or worse, is ‘unable to make the necessary social use of them’ (Enzensberger, 2000: 68). Faced with these issues, it seems only sensible to view the field of participation that was opened by the evolution of networks as a horizon full of possibilities for achieving many of the social and political objectives that Debord and Enzensberger, among many others, set forth decades ago. Moreover, we can say that the Web today may have reached a first stage of true fulfilment of its communicative and social possibilities, offering us a glimpse of what may someday become actual proof of Dan Gillmor’s statement that identified “us” with ‘the media’ (‘We, the media’—Gillmor, 2004).

At the political level, the new collaborative paradigm of the second stage of the Web protagonized by that connected multitude that expresses itself and shares on networks is one of the clearest steps toward the effective existence of a social model that considers a ‘democracy of the multitude’ (in keeping with the thought of Occam, Marsilius of Padua, or Spinoza, among others) as the absolute form of politics. Accepting this standpoint, the connected multitude, an infinite multiplicity of active singularities, could be considered in its most emancipatory and creative potentials, as the origin of a politics not over life but of life, that is, a clear example of the introduction of ‘the power of life’ into politics.[2]

The connected multitude poses no threat to individualism, given that homogenization is not a part of its constitution. It is a multitude that has nothing to do with the concept of ‘the masses’ which played a major part in political thought in the past. To the contrary, we should consider its presence as our most efficient, promising possibility for resistance in the face of attempts at an undifferentiated unification, attempts at the destruction of individual singularity that has always been the goal of the traditional mass communication media.

However, one inevitably must admit that ‘amateur’ creative production is plagued with repetition and imitation, as examples of singularity in that milieu are statistically extremely scarce in relation to the number of participants. However, behind the repetition and what is of no interest we should also be able to see the vitality underlying that show of free creation and public sharing, as well as imagining with Blochian hope all that it promises. For there is nothing sterile about this intensification of creativity on everyone’s part; nor about the independence of their productions from any professional context of receivers and any compensation other than that of making those creations available to the public, free of charge.

On the Web, a whole new field of social opportunities is arising from the creative and communicative potentials that are taking form in the infinite number of social networks and cooperatives that make up Web 2.0. This progressive indifferentiation between information transmitters and receivers means, above all, that the production of representation and the ordering and organization of contents is no longer a monopoly of professionalized sectors.

Anthropologically speaking, the most important characteristic of the majority of the images and videos we see on photoblogs and videoblogs is that they do not depict other, possible worlds or even variations and extensions of this one. Instead, the images portray the world we inhabit. They are images of our life in this world, life that aims to intensify itself through permanent self-representations and visual records of events and pleasure. Millions of photographs and videos of all kinds of things and moments have escaped from their former privacy in private albums and are now available to millions of people. A community is thus created of people taking part in a representation that fundamentally is also a reflection of themselves.

Each photograph, each video that is uploaded onto the Web is a small sample of its authors’ lives. In sharing it, they are trying to pass along their enthusiasm to others. Their aim, beyond publicly communicating any particular experience, may be to feel a certain kind of ‘communion’ with many others in the experience they share through that file. For all expressions of life, especially all images of pleasure, always seek the confirmation of their experience through the figure of the collective, and at this time that is completely possible.

In this new context, the most effective criticism can only now be conceived in terms of creating something new, as a production of alternative imagined realms. Maybe we should even accept that we can now only interpret the world by transforming it, recreating it. The clearest foundations for the proposal are to be found, without a doubt, in Foucault, for whom political resistance, conceptualized only in terms of negation, would represent only a minimally effective form. Thus, resistance should be understood as the creation of new forms of life, of a new culture, where minorities should affirm themselves ‘not only as far as their identity but also as a creative force’ (Foucault, 1994: 741). They also propose the development of an alternative ontological base, centred and sustained by the multitude’s creative and productive practices, for its constituting force would be the product of its creative imagination, which would configure its own constitution (Hardt and Negri, 2002: 43).

The development of the participatory possibilities of the Web today has certainly facilitated the construction of new circuits of value and meaning charged with great creative autonomy and a notable subversive capacity. The creative potentials of the diversity of the connected multitude hold great potential which is already being activated. And that given the fact that almost all offers for participation in the current Web are formed by a studied system of economic management. The development of that huge power to create and share is incomparably more important in the new stage of the Web than anything that business parasites can obtain from it. The possibilities of production of differentiation and singularity that appear on the networks are much more powerful than the patterns of repetition and imitation of stereotypical commercial and professional models which, statistically, comprise the majority of contents on those networks.

However, many detractors of Web 2.0 see that interest in other people’s images, videos, experiences, opinions and private lives as similar to what already happened with the ‘Big Brother’ television phenomenon. A certain fascination for what is not worth reading, seeing, or hearing, which means the Web is being filled with records of completely irrelevant events, following the overbearing logic of ‘you are the information’.

What is definitely happening is an abandonment of privacy at all levels, perhaps because we are increasingly less able to understand it and value it, given that it practically does not exist in our lives. Today the multitude of users on the large participatory Web platforms upload videos and photographs of their most personal experiences, making them public, showing no hesitation but rather enjoyment in giving access to images of their private life to anyone who comes across them or looks for them. Perhaps an explanation lies in a certain effect of a new stage in the process of exteriorization. In the 1960s, McLuhan pointed out that people were beginning to wear their brains outside their skulls and their nerves outside their skin, and subsequently there was an enormous exteriorization of memory through the development of personal digital storage systems (1964). Today that exteriorization has taken another step, where users store things in memory systems they do not even own. That is, the collective memories of the large Web 2.0 platforms that have become gigantic files, eliminating any relation of necessity or dependence linking privacy and a space that is private or with limited access.

A new challenge of the utmost importance in the field of ‘non-amateur’ creation is posed by the fact that much of the visual production that is enjoyed and shared on the networks is not made by professionals in image-making fields. We might say that today one gets a glimpse of what Rousseau proposed in his Carta a d’Alembert (1758), where he suggested that public festivities replace theatrical performances. ‘Place a post crowned with flowers in the centre of a town square, gather the townspeople, and you will have a party. Do something even better: offer the audience as the performance; turn them into the actors’ (Rousseau, 1994).

Art 2.0?

Admitting that Rousseau’s idea fits the present does not mean that the role of the artist has dissolved in the infinite stream of unintentionally artistic, or purely amateur, images and visual productions. At this point, in the field of the networks, the possible differences between ‘art’ and ‘not art’ are a matter of nuance in terms of the intensity with which each creation reveals and expands upon the essential aspects and potentials of living and of the critical consciousness possible in that connected multitude.

The most effective artistic thought would not be limited merely to forming part of the expression of the vitality of the productive multitude. It would also generate the most intense evocations of the infinite wealth of differences that form the connected multitude, while also revealing the multitude lying beneath each single subject. In this sense, if the on-line multitude is formed by infinite subjects that, like atoms, move and find each other according to ‘clinamens that are always untimely and exceptional’ (Negri, 2005), then perhaps it is an essential mission of artistic practices to show the emancipatory potentials that, still dormant, lie beneath the exceptional and single nature of those clinamens.

What we could call ‘art’ in the context of Web 2.0 is certainly what most reinforces our belief in the potentials of the connected multitude, in its possibilities for the free production of critical thought and new life. That all means that art, the optimal form of resistance in the context of the new networks, would be an extreme herald of the constituting power of the multitude. That is, the world that the multitude can build is foreshadowed in the best artistic proposals, always manifested from the demands of interpretive thought, of critical and meaningful communication. Through the most interesting artistic proposals an attempt, at least, would be made at a poetic reconfiguration of the social interactions of the connected collectives.

Given the above, an essential aspect in assessing the relative interest of 2.0 creative productions would be the degree of intensity with which the creations express and foreshadow a form of ‘liberated freedom’ as opposed to freedom as merely a business strategy, which is what the majority of ‘amateur’ creative production is subject to. Thus, the success of any given artistic proposal in the Web 2.0 context would depend on its capacity to evoke in the interior of the singularity of that specific creation not only abstract aspects of the life of a global space but above all the tensions of renewal and transformation, of critical thought, pleasure, more freedom and more singularity that are inherent to the connected multitude.

That means in no case can we conceive of the idea of art on the networks as an element transcending life. To the contrary, it must be seen as an element able to penetrate life, affirm existence and the power of difference, of the exceptional in each of the infinite elements forming the infinity of connected lives. At the same time, we must view it as what proves the common underlying that whole world of singularities: a need to live more fully, with more shared expressions of solidarity, of a life accommodated to others not through homogenization but rather through an enjoyment of differences. Accumulating evidence of that ‘common’ through the celebration and identification of infinite singularities is, in a way, advancing a form of resistance that foreshadows what is affirmed in the slogan ‘Another world is possible’, which, as Negri writes, implies ‘an exodus toward ourselves’ (2005).

Social networks and affectivity

In this second stage of the Web, we see how vital interrelations are fully productive economically. A new theory of value must be put into place given that the new informational economy, the production of social networks, is based on increasingly immaterial work, almost completely based on emotional production: on the manipulation and management of emotions and sociality. Given that, we can affirm that the nature of production mechanisms of collective subjectivity are already intrinsically emotional today. That is why, in the emotional application of social relations, the new cultural and entertainment industries are expected to possess a greater transformative capacity of the social as their major lucrative potential. That is why, to a large extent, the artistic projects that explore the world of the social networks, the places and the ways that encounters occur, dialogues and exchanges on the Internet are fundamentally approximations to the problems that arise in relation to the emotional nature of biopolitical production.

It seems almost impossible to question that, in the context of the connected society, the possibility of efficient political resistance should be approached from the appropriation and recognition of the emancipatory potential of the principles that form an essential part of productive biopolitical dynamics such as affection, cooperation, and friendship. The mission of the new resistance is to rescue them from their domestication by companies. That resistance should make the potential they contain for the production of a new community clear, to generate an active set-up of the principle of the common. And perhaps artistic creation (let’s remember that traditionally, aesthetic experience has been considered purely emotional) is one of the best means for carrying out this rescue.

Filtering and ‘tagging’

Participation and synergy in real time is what this new stage in the Web should ideally offer; that is, broadening potentials for acquiring knowledge. No one knows everything but everyone, jointly, can know everything. An extremely important step forward in collectivized, mutualised knowledge. It is the arrival of a stage of broadened ‘co-intelligence”, of the reciprocal production of knowledge among infinite persons, of a multitudinous cooperative development and of the increasingly open possession of knowledge, all channelled through inclusive systems, and not designed to prevent anyone from the possibility of contributing. Undoubtedly, the potential illuminators of ‘general intellect’ are none other than teleology of the commons on linguistic interchange and cooperation.

This all leads to constant attempts to apply the free software model to any field of creation and knowledge and explorations in relation to ‘Commons-based peer production’, are not few in number either (Benkler, 2006). That is, the study of modes of production based on the cooperation of autonomous agents in coordinating the creative energy of a huge number of persons, in which the efforts and pleasure of a multitude of singularities are joined, and in which each of its members has different abilities, very different knowledge, properties that are added up and creatively complement those of others.

More so than in the field of collective creation, the requirements for applying these models when the amount of available data of all kinds circulating on the Web is so huge make the tasks of tagging, filtering, and prioritization of the available information much more crucial. In fact, applying the cooperation potential inherent to the system of the connected multitude in this direction and specific applications are one of the primary operating fundamentals on Web 2.0. We mustn’t forget that what can be understood as this second stage of the Web consists of ‘content generated by the user’ as much as ‘content filtered by the user’ (Dawson, 2006). That is, its primary action axis would be the implementation of strategies allowing ‘collective intelligence’ to act as a filter and engine for the efficient organization of the available information, and that ordering can be useful not only for the main flows on the Web but also for more specific, particular ones. Going from the task of offering ‘data’ to providing ‘metadata’ is a step forward that would also explain the complementarity of the concepts of Web 2.0 and semantic Webs, based on the incorporation of all kinds of metadata (descriptors, identifiers, etc.)

The essential character on Web 2.0 of activities such as classifying, tagging, selecting, voting, scoring, etc. makes data organization methods for the culture of the networks one of the areas of greatest interest in on-line artistic creation. And of all the paths initiated in the artistic themes of data filtering, identification and assessment, those focused on ‘tagging’ have generated the greatest interest. Examples of this path are some of the initiatives of Les Liens Invisibles and Jonathan Harris, among many other authors.[3]

Undoubtedly, the relation between images and identifying terms, or ‘tags’, is linked in the field of the theory of contemporary art to an old relation between image and word, and between art work and title. The problematic nature of the relations established between text and image, that were essential in conceptual art, have once again been activated by the new dynamic of ‘tagging’ as a practice of social organization of the visual elements of the culture in which a huge field has opened up for artistic reflection.

Blog art?

A key element of many blogs is that personal life, information and opinions are not separate. One of its most interesting potentials is its capacity to create collectivity through resources and positions that in many cases are merely autobiographical; that is, through subjectivity expressed, shared, and commented on. The blog phenomenon is surely the clearest return to the “self” and to subjectivity itself in the field of media, the activation of a certain ‘egology’. It is about reclaiming a democratization of the possibilities of the expressive ‘self’, of subjectivity made public, that is shown and exhibited, as a catalyst of many other internal voices that will be encouraged to follow the exercise of a ‘self’, giving public voice to personal consciousness that is expressed and investigated, practiced in writing, in the collection and interrelation of things and aspects that it finds of interest.

Obviously, many of the propositional, creative and expressive aspects of the blog phenomenon make many of their authors define their blogs as art works in their own right. Of course, many blogs show extremely creative and poetic qualities that make them much more than alternative systems for personal and interpersonal expression and communication. Actually, the most interesting cases are true examples of the possibilities of artistic thought to act in the reconfiguration of models for communicative practices and of cultural and social criticism of networks. In many of them, we see the huge capacity that poetic activities have, through the interpretive demands of art works, to effect an intense, efficient criticism of current processes for the inclusion of the subject in the society of interconnected media. Of course, the perverse irony that characterizes the majority of ‘blog art’ proposals actively collaborates in the suspension (and even subversion) of the most deeply rooted expectations about the communicative interactions that we consider to be informative, normal, or useful in the present field of networks. The proposals of blog art also constitute intense questioning of whether the world is, as many blogs seems to show in their extreme intensification of the presence of an ego, a correlate of what ‘I perceive’, ‘I feel’, and ‘I believe.

Some of the most interesting results so far of ‘blog art’ have emerged from projects centred on studying the recording of time innate to blogs. Only from the field of artistic propositions could we understand, for example, the extreme degree to which life is subject to recorded time in projects such as Obsessive Consumption by Kate Bingaman or the work titled Eat 22 by E. Harrinson. These two examples evoke the huge set of proposals of blogs taken to the limit which are only comprehensible from the perspective of conceptual art. They refer to the complexity inherent to the time relationship established among the blog, the subject who ‘posts’ something, and the readers, which is none other than that relationship of life itself in the shared recording of its passage through time. These projects emphasize the fact that we are fundamentally shared time (which is exhibited and recorded on media in today’s world). Due to the above, ‘blog art” can be said to be an experiment not with a new media but rather of the artist in it (while being watched by many others).

Artistic practices in the reconfiguration of communicative interactions

Of special value is creativity oriented to the production of cooperative devices for activating and developing communities, of means for free communication of the parasitic behaviour of companies dominating the Web today. In fact, many of the most interesting projects we can identify within the broad group of artistic practices are centred on promoting the public domain, on how to facilitate the voluntary provision of public goods that are communicatively and experientially meaningful.

One of the traditional definitions of artistic creation has been a critical experimentation in language or the invention of new languages. Perhaps in this sense, many of its still to be revealed capacities will reconfigure communicative interactions in the new era of digital political activism. That is, provided that it is based on the belief that it is possible to solve many of the new social and political problems of new societies through developing a different kind of public communication. It is reasonable to think that it possesses a hugely valuable capacity to diminish the effects of the colonization of communication by economic interests.

And perhaps we can affirm that the role of creation most committed to social and political reflection in the new networks resides in its capacity to overcome a certain incommunicable character of the battles in the network society. There, everything seems to be legitimated on the basis of principles such as progress, communication, participation, etc., which seem to strangle all types of effective dissention. Perhaps the critical thought innate to artistic practices can help us immensely in gaining a better understanding of what we can consider as truly social with respect to some new technologies and applications that, as in the context of Web 2.0, are always presented to us as completely social media.

It is clear in the most interesting proposals of the new ‘on-line’ artistic behaviours that art can make part of the information and data circulating on the networks not only consumed but also properly situated in relation to their existential elements. That is, one of the major commitments of the best artistic creations in the context of Web 2.0 would be to design new paths for taking the interpretive experience model inherent to artistic practices to the field of social and communicative interaction. It behoves us to give intensive thought to the possibilities of artistic practices in the face of an ecological recomposition of communication (Guattari, 2001). This would be a new attempt to overcome the imprisonment in the constant but banal communication process inherent in mass media, and also to define that refusal to communicate that Theodor Adorno considered as a measure of the truth of art works in a cultural system where communication is organized via manipulation in order to produce a given effect, where the former would only have an alienated existence (Adorno, 1992).

Due to the above, it is logical that nowadays there are quite a few artistic proposals centred on the ways the new digital social networks function. Their intention is to bring to the forefront of public attention the ways language and communicative interactions in general can be toyed with. That is, showing how the economic appropriation of free communication and the desire to cooperate is carried out, offering a poetic rendition of how the ideal of interactivity is truncated. We can only imagine that ideal as giving oneself linguistically to another, as an exchange of what one does not have, that is, what one is. The great challenge of artistic creation then is, in the boundary-crossing dynamics of human presences in network environments, to build flows of value and meaning independent of the logic of markets and corporate interests.

The fact that the most recent artistic proposals on the networks are so ironic and critical instead of optimistic is because Web 2.0 has been presented to us corporatively as an idyllic field of happiness, joy, friendship, sharing, and communication, all increasing endlessly. With networks today defined through these principles, there is an assumption of a blanket neutral ideology. The most critical of these art works and actions oppose the acceptance of that assumption, and will do so repeatedly. The subjects of those art works and actions coincide with specific ways the Web 2.0 works. Interpreting them demands an interpretive, critical and political reflection of the ways the Web works as well as the mediation mechanisms and socialization control predisposed by the Web.

It is quite likely that the interpretive values of the new ‘on-line’ artistic practices are based on the important possibility of opposing the disappearance o fan awareness of reality as a pace full of oppositions and frictions. That awareness is becoming increasingly difficult given that everything is veiled behind continuous telematics, set out through principles and promises always linked to communication that already impedes a perception of any contradiction whatsoever.

This attempt would explain that a recurring purpose of artistic practices is to reveal what interests are behind those business mediators and how they manage to regulate communicative interactions on the networks, in addition to merely making them possible.

Author’s Biography

Juan Martín Prada is the author of numerous articles and essays about digital aesthetics, and of the following books: La apropiación posmoderna. Arte, práctica apropiacionista y Teoría de la posmodernidad (published by Fundamentos, 2001) and Las nuevas condiciones del arte contemporáneo (Briseño Editores, 2003). He is a contributor to many printed and digital publications including journals such as REIS, Red Digital, Papiers d’art, A minima, Temps d’art, Transversal, Exit Books, Exit Press, Mecad e-Journal, or the newspaper La Vanguardia. He has been a member of the Art-Science-Technology commission at FECYT, the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology. He has a PhD from the University of Madrid (1998) and he is currently a professor at the Social and Communication Sciences School at the University of Cádiz (Spain). He has curated shows of digital media art and since 2007 he coordinates the platform ‘Inclusiva-net.org’ at Medialab-Prado (Madrid).

Notes

[1] I refer to the false automaton known as ‘The Turk’, built in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1804).
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[2] According to Roberto Esposito. ‘if, as Deleuze believes, philosophy is the practice of creating concepts appropriate to the event affecting and transforming us, this is the time to rethink the relationship between politics and life in a way that, instead of subjecting life to political leadership (which occurred over the last century quite clearly), introduces into the power of life into politics’ (Esposito, 2006: 17).
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[3] Of the many existing proposals, the artwork titled Subvertr by Les Liens Invisibles may be one of the most clearly oriented to politically subvert the relations between image and word. The application 10×10 at www.tenbyten.org, designed and developed by Jonathan Harris, attempts to represent visually each hour as well as, through 100 images and words, the collective imagination of news at a global scale. It would influence more than any other project the possibilities of artistic practice as a visualization system of the relations of images to news events in the era of globalized communication, of the forms of its repetition and dissemination at a global level.
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References

Adorno, Theodor W. Teoria Estetica (Madrid: Taurus, 1992).

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics (Paris: les presses du réel, 2002).

Chesbrough, Henry William. Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology Boston. MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003).

Dawson, Ross. ‘Web 2.0 and user filtered content’, Trends in the Living Networks, 9 September 2006, http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2006/09/web_20_and_user.html.

Debord, Guy. ‘Tesis sobre la revolución cultura’, in Textos situacionistas sobre arte and urbanismo, trans. Julio González del Río Rams (Madrid: La Piqueta, 1977).

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von Hippel, Erik Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
Journal Note

A version of this article was originally published on the Re-Public. We are grateful to Juan Martin Prada for allowing us to publish it here as one of a series of texts, chosen by the editors, in which leading thinkers in the area provide important contextual material as an addition to the discussion in the refereed articles section of the Web 2.0 issue of the Fibreculture Journal.

Albert Boswijk, of the Amsterdam-based Center for the Experience Economy, asked me a set of interesting questions:

What is the reality behind so called best practice co-creation concepts? Are these lipservice to co-creative approaches? Are you really in the driver’s seat or are you just being made to believe that you have influence on the outcome? What are the building blocks of co-creation? Which conditions are required? Are organisations really prepared to allow customers to influence and control their organisation and therefore become a co-creative organisation?

To understand the reality or illusion behind projects claiming to practice co-creation or co-design, one must look at the polarities of power and control that determine the context in which the co-creative processes take place, with on the one hand the communities of external collaborators, and on the other hand the corporate entities. But before tackling this issue in particular, it may be useful to see the emerging new paradigm of production that is arising out of the new participative processes.

The new institutional reality could be described as follows.

The First Layer: Collaborative Platforms

At the core are the enabling collaborative socio-technological platforms that allow knowledge workers, software developers and open design communities to collaborate on joint projects, outside of the direct control of corporate entities.

Interesting questions already arise here. These concern who or what is the driving force behind the creation and development of such platforms? They can be initiated by developing communities, managed and maintained by a new type of non-profit institution (like the FLOSS Foundations), or they can be corporate platforms that have been opened up to external participants.

The Second Layer: Open Design Commons/Communities and Physical Infrastructure

Around the corporate platform is the open design community and the knowledge/software/design commons ruled by a set of licenses which determine the particular nature of the property.

Interesting questions arise here. Is it a true commons license like the GPL? Or a sharing license like the Creative Commons, where the stress is on the individual sovereignity in determining the level of sharing that is allowed? Or is it a corporate license, giving very limited rights, or even with outright digital sharecropping, i.e. with the expropriation of the totality of the creative output reserved for usage by the organizing corporation?

It is important to see the open design commons not just as a collaborative community or a new type of ‘intellectual property’ depository, but also as a fundamentally new type of manufacturing infrastructure. Open design communities have different priorities and constraints than proprietary IP, and naturally design for modularity, lower threshold capital requirements, sustainability, etc. Thus, we are talking about the seeding of a new physical productive infrastructure as well.

The Third Layer: Entrepreneurial Coalitions

Around the commons are the entrepreneurial coalitions that benefit and sustain the design commons, create added value on top of it, and sell this as products or services to the market.

Important questions raised here are as follows. How is the coalition itself organized? Do all parties have equal say, as in the Linux Foundation, or does one big party dominate, as in the Eclipse Foundation and IBM. How does the business ecology relate to the community? Is is nothing but a corporate commons?

The Fourth Layer: Funding Ecologies

In addition, there is a funding infrastructure.

What is the process governing the stream of returns from the monetized market sphere; to the commons, its community, and the infrastructure of cooperation? Do businesses support the community directly, through the foundations? Is the government or a set of public authorities involved? Are there crowdfunding mechanisms?

The Fifth Layer: The Partner State as Orchestrator?

Finally, there is the role of public authorities and governments in orchestrating the public-private-common triad in order to benefit from the local effects of the new networked coopetition between entrepreneurial coalitions and their linked communities.

In the not so far future, wealth building or sustaining capacity will be determined to a large degree by the capacity of cities, regions and states to insert themselves within the global coopetition between different enterpreneurial coalitions (think Drupal vs Joomla, but on a much larger scale).

Overview of the Main Models Emerging So Far

When we via these layers through an interlocking triad (community—foundation—business) or quaternary structure (if public authorities are involved), we can now distinguish at least three main models:

• In commons-centred peer production, like Linux, the community is at the core, and a real commons operates, with the community strong enough to sustain its own infrastructure, and cooperating with market players.
• In a sharing environment, where individuals share their creative endeavour, it is the corporate third party platform which monetizes the attention space, and may control the platform to a significant degree; the community does not control its own platform, but is not without power of influence, since quick and massive mobilizations are always possible.
• In a crowdsourced environment, participant producers are even more isolated from each other, and the corporation integrates them into the value chain which they control. Since individuals are here competing for market value themselves, solidarity is more difficult to obtain, giving corporate platform owners more influence.

A good illustration of the various possibilities is Lego. Lego still operates as a classical producer of toys, selling to consumers. In Lego Factory, it provides a crowdsourced environment, where co-designers can take a cut of the kits they succeed in selling; the new Lego World virtual environment is a sharing environment; finally, Lugnet is true commons-oriented peer production, happening outside the control of the company altogether.

The Ladder of Participation: The Gradation of Control on Community/Corporate Polarity

Here are ten different co-creation modalities, depending on the polarity of control between peer producers and the corporate entities:

1. Consumers: you make, they consume. The classic model.
2. Self-service: you make, they go get it themselves. This is where consumers start becoming prosumers, but the parameters of the cooperation are totally set by the producing corporation. It’s really not much more than a strategy of externalization of costs. Think of ATM’s and gas stations. We could call it simple externalization.
3. Do-it-yourself: you design, they make it themselves. One step further, pioneered by the likes of Ikea, where the consumers re-assemble the product themselves. There is a complex externalization of business processes.
4. Company-based Crowdsourcing: the company organizes a value chain which lets the wider public produce the value, but under the control of the company.
5. Co-design: you set the parameters, but you design it together. For examples, see here: http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Co-Design.
6. Co-creativity: you both create cooperatively. In this stage, the corporation does not even set the parameters, the prosumer is an equal partner in the development of new products. Perhaps the industrial model of the adventure sports material makers would fit here. For examples, see here: http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Co-Creation.
7. Sharing communities create the value: Web 2.0 proprietary platforms attempt to monetize participation.
8. Peer production proper: communities create the value, using a Commons, with assistance from corporations who attempt to create derivative streams of value. Linux is the paradigmatic example.
9. Peer production with cooperative production: peer producers create their own vehicles for monetization. The OS Alliance is an example of this.
10. Peer production communities or sharing communities place themselves explicitly outside of the monetary economy.

A diagram that mindmaps the possibilities of the open is found here.

Author’s Biography

Michel Bauwens is an active writer, researcher and conference speaker on the subject of technology, culture and business innovation. He is the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. He has been an analyst for the United States Information Agency, knowledge manager for British Petroleum, eBusiness Strategy Manager for Belgacom, as well as an internet entrepreneur in his home country of Belgium. He has co-produced the 3-hour TV documentary Technocalyps with Frank Theys, and co-edited the two-volume book on anthropology of digital society with Salvino Salvaggio. Michel is currently Primavera Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and external expert at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (2008). Michel currently lives in Bangkok, Thailand. In February 2009, he joined Dhurakij Pundit University’s International College as Lecturer, assisting with the development of the Asian Foresight Institute.

Notes

[1] Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens.
[back]

[2] The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN.
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Journal Note

A version of this article was originally published on the Institute for Distributed Creativity list. We are grateful to both Michael Bauwens and the Institute for Distributed Creativity for allowing us to publish it here as one of a series of texts, chosen by the editors, in which leading thinkers in the area provide important contextual material as an addition to the discussion in the refereed articles section of the Web 2.0 issue of the Fibreculture Journal.

Geert Lovink
University of Amsterdam

Ned Rossiter
University of Nottingham, Ningbo

0.

The internet turns out to be neither the problem nor the solution for the global recession. As an indifferent bystander it doesn’t lend itself easily as a revolutionary tool. The virtual has become the everyday. The New Deal is presented as green, not digital. The digital is a given. This low-key position presents an opportunity to rethink the Web 2.0 hype. How might we understand our political, emotional and social involvement in internet culture over the next few years?

1.

News media is awash with ‘economic crisis’, indulging in its self-generated spectacle of financial meltdown. Experts are mobilised, but only to produce the drama of dissensus. Programmed disagreement is the consensus of daily news. Crisis, after all, is the condition of possibility for capitalism. Unlike the dotcom crash in 2000-2001, when the collapse of high-tech stocks fueled the global recession, the internet has so far managed to stay out of the blame game. Web 2.0 only suffers mild side effects from the odd collection of platforms and services, from Google to Wikipedia, Photobucket, Craigslist, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Habbo and so-called regional players such as Baidu and 51.com. Despite its benign existence, there still is hyper-growth wherever you look. Web 2.0 applications and platforms remain ‘new’ but show a tendency to get lost inside the boring, stressful and uncertain working life of the connected billions.

2.

Social networks are technologies of entertainment and diffusion. The social reality they create is real, but as a technology of immediacy you can’t get no satisfaction. We initially love them for their distraction from the torture of now-time. Networking sites are social drugs for those in need of the Human that is located elsewhere in time or space. It is the pseudo Other that we are connecting to. Not the radical Other or some real Other. We systematically explore weakness and vagueness and are pressed to further enhance the exhibition of the Self. ‘I might know you (but I don’t). Do you mind knowing me?’. The pleasure principle of entertainment thus diffuses social antagonisms—how does conflict manifest within the comfort zones of social networks and their tapestries of auto-customisation? The business-minded ‘trust doctrine’ has all but eliminated the open, dirty internet forums. Most Web 2.0 are echo chambers of the same old opinions and cultural patterns. As we can all witness, they are not exactly hotbeds of alternative sub-culture. What’s new are their ‘social’ qualities: the network is the message. What’s created here is a sense or approximation of the social. Social networks register a ‘refusal of work’. But our net-time, after all, is another kind of labour. Herein lies the perversity of social networks: however radical they may be, they will always be data-mined. They are designed to be exploited. Refusal of work becomes just another form of making a buck that you never see.

3.

Social networking sites are as much fashion victims as everything else. They come and go. Their migration across space signals the enculturisation of software. While Orkut disappeared in G8 countries, it is still Big in Brazil. Is anyone still seriously investing in real estate in Second Life? What the online world needs is sustainable social relations. The moving herds that go from one server to the next merely demonstrate an impulsive grazing mentality: once the latest widgets are installed, it is time to move on. Sustainability is connected to scaleability. Here, we see lessons from the major social movements over the last 50 years. The force of accumulated social-political desires manifest, eventually, in national and global forums that permeate back into policy discourse and social practice: think March on Washington, 1963 (Black Civil Rights), Rio, 1992 (Earth Summit), Porto Alegre, 2001 (World Social Forum), Geneva and Tunis, 2003-2005 (World Summit on the Info-Society). None of these examples are exempt from critique. We note them here to signal the relationship between sustainability and scalar transformation. We are familiar with formats such as barcamps, unconferencing and have participated in DIY techno-workshops at those seasonal media arts festivals. But these are hardly instances of sustainability. Their temporality of tinkering is governed by the duration of the event. True, there is occasionally resonance back in the local hack-lab, but such practices are exclusive to techno-secret societies, not the networked masses. Social networking sites are remarkable for their capacity to scale. Their weakness is their seeming incapacity to effect political change in any substantive way. The valorisation of citizen-journalism is not the same as radical intervention, and is better understood as symptomatic of the structural logic of outsourcing media production and election campaign management.

4.

From social to socialism is a small step for humankind ­ but a big step for the Western subject. What makes the social attractive, and socialism so old school and boring? What is the social anyway? We have to be aware that such postmodern academic language games do not deepen our understanding of the issues, nor widen our political fantasies. We need imagination, but only if it illuminates concepts that transform concrete conditions. The resurrection of the social after its disappearance is not an appealing slogan. Some ideas have an almost direct access to our body. Others remain dead. This in particular counts for insider jargon such as rent, multitude, common, commons and communism. There’s a compulsion to self-referentiality here that’s not so different from the narcissistic default of so many blogs. What, then, are the collective concepts of the social networked masses? For now, they are engineered from the top-down by the corporate programmers, or they are outsourced to the world of widgets. Tag, Connect, Friend, Link, Share, Tweet. These are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism. They are directives from the Central Software Committee. «Participation» in «social networks» will no longer work, if it ever did, as the magic recipe to transform tired and boring individuals into cool members of the mythological Collective Intelligence. If you’re not an interesting individual, your participation is not really interesting. Data clouds, after all, are clouds: they fade away. Better social networks are organized networks involving better individuals—it’s your responsibility, it’s your time. What is needed is an invention of social network software where everybody is a concept designer. Let’s kill the click and unleash a thousand million tiny tinkerers!

5.

We are addicted to ghettoes, and in so doing refuse the antagonism of ‘the political’. Where is the enemy? Not on Facebook, where you can only have ‘friends’. What Web 2.0 lacks is the technique of antagonistic linkage. Instead, we are confronted with the Tyranny of Positive Energy. Life only consists of uplifting experiences. Depression is not a design principle. Wikipedia‘s reliance on ‘good faith’ and its policing of protocols quite frequently make for a depressing experience in the face of an absence of singular style. There ain’t no ‘neutral point of view’. This software design principle merely reproduces the One Belief System. Formats need to be transformed if they are going to accommodate the plurality of expression of networked life. Templates function as zones of exclusion. But strangely, they also exclude the conflict of the border. The virus is the closest thing to conflict online. But viruses work in invisible ways and function as a generator of service labour for the computer nerd who comes in and cleans your computer.

6.

The critique of simulation falls short here. There is nothing ‘false’ about the virtuality of social networking sites. They are about as real it gets these days. Stability accumulates for those hooked to networks. Things just keep expanding. More requests. More friends. More time for social-time. With the closure of factories comes the opening of data-mines. Privacy is so empty of curiosity that we are compelled to slap it on our Wall for all to see. If we are lucky, a Friend refurbishes it with a comment. And if you are feeling cheeky, then Throw A Sheep! You would be hard-pressed to notice any substantive change. But you will be required to do never-ending maintenance work to manage all your data feeds and updates. That’ll subtract a bit of time from your daily routine.

7.

The Network will not be Revolutionized. What does this mean for Indymedia 2.0? The question of why indymedia.org failed and did not further develop into an active and open social networking site or clearly take up a position in the Web 2.0 debate is something that needs to be addressed (see the nettime debate of May 2009). Have media activists already learnt enough of the Brechtian Indymedia Lehrstueck that started in the late nineties? Is global branding and branching, as in the case of Indymedia (one name, often similar design, sharing of servers, some syndication of content, etc.), still as important as it used to be? Indymedia met the challenge of scaleability in amazing ways only to discover its limits. Contamination seems key for transnational social-political networks. As do regular face-to-face meetings. Let your network connect with the concrete and adaptation and transformation will undoubtedly kick in. Then try reconnecting across networks (and other institutional and organizational forms) on the global scale. Conflict will already have multiplied and the primary condition of sustainability will be underway.

8.

Web 2.0 is not for free. ‘Free as in free beer’ is not like ‘free as in freedom’. Open does not equal free. These days ‘free’ is just another word for service economies. The linux fiefdom know that all too well. We need to question naïve campaigns that merely promote ‘free culture’ without questioning the underlying parasitic economy and the ‘deprofessionalization’ of cultural work. Pervasive profiling is the cost of this opening to ‘free market values’. As users and prosumers we are limited by our capacity as data producers. Our tastes and preferences, our opinions and movements are the market price to pay. At present, Facebook‘s voluntary and enthusiastic auto-filing system on a mass scale represents the high point of this strategy. But we cannot succumb to the control paranoia and to the logic of fear. Let’s inject more kaos in it! So what if you have your anti-whatever Facebook group? What does it change other than expanding your number of friends? Is deleting the radical gesture of 2009? Why not come up a more subversive and funny, anti-cyclical act? Are you also looking for rebel tactical tools?

9.

Soon the Web 2.0 business model will be obsolete. It is based on the endless growth principle, pushed by the endless growth of consumerism. The business model still echoes the silly 90s dotcom model: if growth stagnates, it means the venture has failed and needs to be closed down. Seamless growth of customised advertising is the fuel of this form of capitalism, decentralized by the user-prosumer. Mental environment pollution is parallel to natural environment pollution. But our world is finished (limited). We have to start elaborating appropriate technologies for a finite world. There is no exteriority, no other worlds (second, third, fourth worlds) where we can dump the collateral effects of insane development. We know that Progress is a bloodthirsty god that extracts a heavy human sacrifice. A good end cannot justify a bad means. On the contrary, technologies are means that have to justify the end of collective freedom. No sacrifice will be tolerated: martyrs are not welcome. Neither are heroes.

10.

‘Better a complex identity than an identity complex’. We need to promote peer-education that shifts the default culture of auto-formation to the nihilist pleasure of hacking the system. Personal exhibition on Web 2.0 social networks resembles the discovery of sexuality. Anxiety over masturbation meets digital narcissism (obsessive touching up of personal profiles) and digital voyeurism (compulsive viewing of other’s profiles, their list of friends, secrets, etc.). To avoid the double trap of blind technophilia and luddite technophobia, we have to develop complex digital identities. They have to answer to individual desires and satisfy multiple needs. Open-ID are a good starting point. ‘Steal my profile’. It’s time to remix identity. Anonymity is a good alternative to the pressures of the control society, but there must be alternatives on offer. One strategy could be to make the one (‘real’) identity more complex and, where possible, contradictory. But whatever your identify might be, it will always be harvested. If you must participate in the accumulation economy for those in control of the data mines, then the least you can do is Fake Your Persona.

Authors’ Biographies

Ippolita is an Italian Collective.

Geert Lovink is a Research Professor of Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) and an Associate Professor of New Media at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Lovink is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, whose goals are to explore, document and feed the potential for socio-economical change of the new media field through events, publications and open dialogue. He is the author of many books, including Dark Fiber, Uncanny Networks, My First Recession and Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Studies.

Ned Rossiter is Associate Professor of Network Cultures, University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is author of Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (2006) and co-editor of numerous volumes, including (with Geert Lovink) MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries (2007).

Note

A version of this article was originally published on the Nettime mailing list and the blogs of the authors. We are grateful to Ippolita, Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter for allowing us to publish it here as one of a series of texts, chosen by the editors, in which leading thinkers in the area provide important contextual material as an addition to the discussion in the refereed articles section of the Web 2.0 issue of the Fibreculture Journal.

1. Web 2.0 and its Critical Contradictions

At the 2007 International Communication Association Conference, Web 2.0 was highlighted as an emergent topic of research with a keynote panel entitled ‘What’s so Significant about Social Networking? Web 2.0 and its Critical Potentials’. One of the thought-provoking moments during the panel was the juxtaposition of two very different and at first, contradictory theoretical approaches to the relationships between Web 2.0 and user-generated content. While Henry Jenkins focused on the democratic potential of online participatory culture as enabling new modes of knowledge production, Tiziana Terranova argued for a post-Marxist perspective on Web 2.0 as a site of cultural colonization and expansion of new forms of capitalization on culture, affect and knowledge. The juxtaposition of these two very different critical approaches did not simply rehash the old divide between cultural theory, particularly active audience theory, and post-Marxist critical theory; rather, this debate over Web 2.0 suggested new possibilities for the synthesis and continued development of both sets of critiques. In other words, the event reinforced our belief that corporate colonization arguments do not provide an entirely adequate model for understanding Web 2.0. After all, commercial Web 2.0 spaces such as Facebook, YouTube and MySpace are important sites of cultural exchange and political discussion, in part because they almost entirely rely on user-generated content to exist.

Internet users are producing videos, blogging, organizing themselves, and making their voices heard across the globe. From the global mobilization of a network of support for monks in Burma to videos scrutinizing the actions of public figures, the political and cultural importance of Web 2.0 has radically changed the ways in which culture is produced and lived. At the same time, the surveillance and commercialisation of information produced by users cannot be ignored. Indeed, apart from the notable exception of Wikipedia, the Web 2.0 sphere is dominated by aggressive entrepreneurial models and goals: YouTube for example was bought by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006, while Facebook rejected a $1.62 billion offer from Yahoo! in the same year. The for-profit imperative of Web 2.0, though, has not gone unchallenged. Facebook users have been extremely vocal over the years with privacy settings and policies (Boyd, 2008) Facebook has made concessions and changed some of its features, managing to maintain a dataveillant business model while quelling public outrage.[1] The process of negotiating privacy within a space of personal publicity thus raises interesting questions about creativity and empowerment within an emerging cyber-capitalist infrastructure.

Major commercial Web 2.0 sites thus present us with a paradox that unfortunately neither position can fully resolve. On the one hand, such popular platforms allow users to express themselves to new audiences in ways that were not possible before. On the other hand, even though they are freely accessible and have come to act as seemingly quasi-public spaces, such platforms are designed to produce profits, mostly through the tracking of user behaviors, interests, and patterns of use to create new forms of customized advertising. Zimmer (2008) notes that this Faustian trade-off that takes place with user-generated sites and social network sites in particular: the ease of communication, connection and exploration of one’s interests can only take place through agreeing to terms of service and terms of use that allow for dataveillance and the commercialisation of user-generated content through advertising.

The popularity and rich cultural experiences witnessed on these spaces cannot be simply dismissed as yet another form of corporate control over culture, or Orwellian dataveillant machine. It would thus appear that current analytical frameworks and tools have failed to fully comprehend the ontology of commercial Web 2.0. If we are to identify critical alternatives to commercial Web 2.0 and, more generally, if we are to intervene in the ontogenesis of Web 2.0, we need to reconstruct a critical approach that deals with these contradictions. The analysis of the ontogenesis[2] of Web 2.0 – of its constant production and reproduction through the deployment of material, technical, semiotic, commercial, political and cultural flows – makes it possible to identify critical points of intervention. In so doing, we can understand the productive power of Web 2.0 through an analysis of the technocultural underpinnings of its structure, functions, and dysfunctions. This paper argues for the following change of perspective: commercial Web 2.0 platforms are not simply about facilitating user-produced content and carrying content across networks to large audiences or ‘end-users’; rather, they are primarily concerned with establishing the technocultural conditions within which users can produce content and within which content and users can be re-channelled through techno-commercial networks and channels. Consequently, new areas of concern with user-generated spaces include not only questions of censorship, but increasingly issues related to the regimes through which information circulates online.

Such a shift in perspective has epistemological consequences in terms of developing a critical understanding of Web 2.0 and furthering our understanding of the political economy of commercial Web 2.0 spaces and spheres. Focusing on the conditions within which users and their content can exist on Web 2.0 spaces invites us to see the ontogenesis of commercial Web 2.0 in terms of active production and constant stabilization of disparate elements: systems, software, human users, commercial forces, political actors, etc. Subsequently, the challenge lies in understanding and identifying these processes of articulation in a grounded manner, that is, in a manner that identifies the unfolding of commercial Web 2.0 ontogenesis and that does not simply try to assert a set framework on a shifting object of study. How can we understand, map and otherwise critique emergent forms of connectivity and articulation among Web 2.0 sites, users and content, especially when the architecture and technical processes shaping communicational dynamics are black-boxed, opaque and secretive? This is not only a technological or methodological challenge, but also an invitation to reassess the shaping of power dynamics in online spaces.

2. From Protocols to Platforms

As a concept, Web 2.0 feels a bit like a black hole: everything gets trapped within its porous boundaries, from commercial and private social networks to open source initiatives such as Wikipedia, from the latest online craze such as Twitter to some of the first successful online business models, such as Amazon (O’Reilly, 2005). Mainstream discourse about Web 2.0 refers to a projected perception of the contemporary state of the World Wide Web as correcting the shortcomings of the previous Web 1.0 era and fostering the articulation of better democracy with new business opportunities. YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia and Google have entered public consciousness to define Web 2.0 and exemplify the larger trends of social media, online video publishing and sharing, user-generated content, blogging, social networking and collaborative platforms like wikis. It is at the level of functionality that Web 2.0 becomes more definable. Two characteristics emerge in that respect: first, Web 2.0 relies on users to produce content. Social network sites such as Facebook rely almost entirely on users posting personal information that is then shared with a network of “friends” through newsfeed stories. The popularity of YouTube is not simply linked to its capacity to act as a repository of mainstream videos, but also for its capacity to offer a venue for people to express themselves through video-making.

The second characteristic logically follows from the first: user-friendly design through complex technical processes. Web 2.0 websites feature rich interactivity, dynamic content and complex interfaces (Vossen and Hagemann, 2007). That is, Web 2.0 makes the Web behave more like desktop software, albeit in a networked environment. The popularity of Web 2.0 spaces such as YouTube, Facebook MySpace, Flickr or Twitter corresponds to the adoption of new techniques to facilitate content production and publishing for users. Tasks that used to require knowledge of HTML, CSS and other publishing Web languages can be done on Web 2.0 spaces through pushing a button or hitting a return key, just like the user-friendly environment of the desktop interface. Following Florian Cramer and Matthew Fuller’s (2008: 149) typology of interfaces, with Web 2.0, the processes of content production and publication are simplified at the level of the user interface, which comprises the ‘symbolic handles’ such as buttons, text box, scrolling devices, etc. that are available to users in order to connect with software programs. The simplification of technical processes from a user point of view and the greater user-friendliness offered by these spaces is accompanied by comparatively more complex and invisible processes that take place via other types of interfaces that connect software to software, software to hardware, and hardware to hardware. Of particular interest in the Web 2.0 environment is the interface that Cramer and Fuller describe as ‘specifications and protocols that determine relations between software and software, that is, application programming interfaces (APIs)’ (Cramer and Fuller, 2008: 149), as they enable the circulation of user-generated content within and across Web 2.0 spaces.

Our approach focuses on understanding the code politics of user-generated content within commercial Web 2.0 spaces. We rely on software studies (Fuller, 2003, 2008) in order to understand the mutual shaping of software, hardware and cultural practices. Software studies invites us to focus on the cultural and communicational changes brought by software, and to pay attention to the ways in which online communication is not simply a human activity, but a set of practices negotiated through complex dynamics between software architectures and different categories of users (i.e. software engineers, citizens, activists, etc.). As a topic stemming from the broader field of software studies, code politics seeks to understand the conditions of code and software in relation to power, capital, and control. Studying code politics means studying how actors have ‘literally encoded the Web for their political purposes’ (Elmer et al., 2007). For example, Grusin (2000) explores the code politics of the computer when he relates an operating system’s desktop with physical real estate that corporations compete to control. He argues that,’whenever you boot up your computer, you are engaging in a commercial transaction in a mediated public space which is being increasingly contested by Microsoft, the USA Government, and inevitably other governments and corporations as well’ (Grusin, 2000: 59). Even the matter of your default web browser has tremendous value for corporations. With user-generated content and commercial Web 2.0, a code politics approach requires moving beyond analyzing the content of the user interface to locating how that content articulates visible and hidden processes. A discussion group on Facebook, for instance, raises questions not only about the content of a discussion, but also about how information about content and users is captured and recirculated by software through data-mining and marketing, about how the presence of commercial forces is facilitated both at the software level and at the economic level of commercial partnerships, and about how users’ participation is rechanneled as marketable data. In short, a code politics approach to user-generated content requires paying attention to the articulations between the user, the software and the interface: to explore how the cultural experiences and practices available at the user-interface level (Cramer & Fuller, 2008; Fuller, 2003; Grusin, 2000; S. Johnson, 1997; Jørgensen & Udsen, 2005; Turkle, 1997) are articulated and coexist with the processes through which software encodes user input according to material (Hayles, 2004; Manovich, 2002), ideological (Chun, 2005), and legal (Grimelmann, 2005; Lessig, 2006) logics. In so doing, a code politics approach seeks to understand the connections that enable and shape the traffic and trafficking of information, data, immaterial labour and subjectivities online.

A code politics approach is hardly new, and actually has been a concern not only in the field of software studies, but also in the development of Web methodologies writ large. Understanding the relationship between the circulation and production of content and the shaping of the communicative possibilities of the Web has been a constant in developing methodologies that take into account the specificities of the Web environment. The problem does not lie in justifying the need for such an approach, but in adapting it to the specific dynamics of commercial Web 2.0. This requires a shift away from the protocological approach that has been dominating Web studies. Protocol refers to the ‘language that regulates flow, directs netspace, codes relationships, and connects life-forms’ on the Internet (Galloway, 2004: 74). Protocol points to the technical conventions that enable computers to communicate in a decentralized network such as the Internet. By extension, protocols are the sites through which possibilities for control and resistance on the Web and the Internet are defined. Studying the protocols that regulate the formation of computer networks thus offers a way to examine the power relations at stake on the Internet in general, and on the Web in particular. While Galloway (2004) focuses on TCP/IP as the protocols that enable the Internet, other Web studies approaches have focused on HTML/HTTP as the protocols that enable communication on the World Wide Web. While HTTP is about the transfer of information, the HTML language is a protocol that encodes content within a specific hyperlinked context. Web studies first started focusing on the hyperlink as a unit of analysis to understand, for instance, how the flow of information through hyperlinks can yield clues as to the communicational and social dynamics of the actors involved in a hyperlinked network (Garrido and Halavais, 2003). Other Web methodologies seek to examine how discussions on issues of common interest can be studied through looking at the evolution of hyperlink networks (Rogers and Marres, 2005). Still other approaches seek to understand the relationship between the protocological aspects of the Web and the circulation of content. Web sphere analysis (Schneider and Foot, 2005), for instance, does not only examine hyperlink networks, but also textual content and website features (e.g. email, message posting) in the case of election campaigns. More recently, efforts have been made to include not only hyperlinks to analyze the shaping of informational dynamics, but also other Web protocols such as metatags, cookies and robot.txt (Elmer, 2006). Common to all these approaches is a focus on the informational dynamics of single protocols.

The transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, however, has changed the language and protocols of the Web. HTML is no longer the dominant language on the web, but rather one among a multiplicity of co-existing and competing languages and protocols. The situation has changed from one dominant markup language on the Web to multiple code languages. As a consequence, hyperlinking is now but one feature of Web 2.0 spaces. Increasingly buttons replace linking and the logic of embedding Web objects on different Web 2.0 spaces is becoming more and more popular: if I like a video on YouTube and want to show it to my friends, I do not send a link via e-mail anymore, I push the Facebook share button on YouTube and the video is immediately embedded in my Facebook profile and visible to all my friends. Furthermore, whereas the production of hyperlinks in the Web 1.0, HTML-dominated environment was created by human users, hyperlinks in Web 2.0 are increasingly produced by software as tailored recommendations for videos or items of interest, suggested friends, etc. The technocultural articulations that regulate the production and circulation of hyperlinks are thus different in the Web 2.0 environment from the Web 1.0 environment, particularly with regards to the re-articulation of hyperlink protocols within other software and protocological processes. The production of an HTML tag linking to a personalized recommendation is the result of the algorithmic processing of a user’s profile correlated with other profiles and potentially commercial interests. While these processes are invisible from a user perspective of instantaneous communication, they nevertheless represent a central site of analysis in order to understand the new communicational and cultural regimes of user-generated environments.

The folding of the once dominant HTML language into a range of other protocols requires changing our assumptions about the Web as an object of study. The dramatic increase of code, operating systems, programs, languages and browsers in the Web 2.0 environment reduces the applicability of protocol to fully encapsulate the conditions and possibilities of Web 2.0. How then might one conceptualize the relationships between different protocols? The model put forward by Galloway starts with the assertion that ‘the content of every protocol is always another protocol’: HTML is encapsulated in HTTP, HTTP is dependent on TCP, TCP on IP, and all these protocols are encapsulated within ‘physical media’ (Galloway, 2004: 10-11). Galloway’s model is ambivalent in that the ‘encapsulating’ of protocols could be understood either as a reduction of all online activity to one protocol or as pointing out that different protocols co-exist, and that they have a hierarchical relationship based on the material requirements needed for them to exist. When the list of protocols was relatively simple – HTML, then HTTP, then TCP/IP – the articulation of protocols was quite straightforward and unproblematic. However, if, as Galloway suggests, protocol determines the limits of possibility, and the number of protocols increases dramatically, we need an answer as to how different protocols interact. One of the central technical characteristics of Web 2.0 is the reliance on APIs, on customized software programs that rearticulate protocols in different ways. Common examples involve Web services, such as Amazon web services, which allow third parties to access the Amazon catalogue, mashups of different Web 2.0 spaces (i.e. Google maps and Flickr images) and internal applications, for instance Facebook applications. APIs process and represent data in different ways, yet they are based on a common set of protocols. Therefore, we need an approach that interrogates the Web as an assemblage of protocols rather than the nesting of one protocol into another. In response, we suggest that protocols act as modular elements, assembled as part of different Web 2.0 platforms.

The modularity of protocols, as elements that serve to create different assemblages, necessitates a platform-based perspective. While the previous protocological approach conceptualized the Web as a carrier of information, the concept of the platform as ‘hardware and/or software that serves as a foundation or base’[3] points out that the articulation of modular protocols enable the possibility for Web 2.0 to run complex software similar to a desktop operating system. Web 2.0 actualizes the universal platform, a constructive space independent of hardware, imagined by the Java project (Mackenzie, 2006). Where Java failed to network enough of its actors to stabilize the platform, Web 2.0 has created a platform by drawing in a variety of standards and actors into its network. Web 2.0 involves HTML, XML, JavaScript, AJAX, PHP, databases, browsers, developers, and users that behave as a platform capable of being the grounds for a new class of websites (Vossen & Hagemann, 2007, pp. 38-48) offering a multiplicity of search and personalization features. While Web 2.0 can be conceptualized as a meta-platform that enables communication across Web 2.0 spaces – e.g. embedding a blog post or a YouTube video in a Facebook page – Web 2.0 spaces should also be considered as platforms in their own right, because they articulate protocols in different ways to operationalize different logics, for instance, open-source or private. A Web 2.0 platform is a convergence of different systems, protocols, and networks that connect people in different and particular ways and thus offer specific conditions of possibility. It becomes central, in turn, to figure out not only the articulation of protocols with other protocols, but also the articulation of protocol with other technocultural dynamics. That is, the question is not simply one of understanding how the imbrication of protocols helps create the personalized and sometimes enclosed, portalized and black-boxed spaces that typify commercial Web 2.0 spaces, but rather how the stabilization of these Web 2.0 platforms is dependent on a host of other commercial, discursive, cultural and legal processes. In that sense, platforms as protocological assemblages have a complex status in that they at the same time are authorized by and enact the specific articulations of legal, economic, social and cultural processes.

3. From Platforms to Worlds

Conceptualizing Web 2.0 spaces as platforms helps highlight the need to examine the modularity of Web 2.0 spaces in order to see how they arise as sites of articulations between a diverse range of processes and actors. Furthermore, the concept of platform as the convergence of technocultural processes that connect people, protocols, and processes in different ways offers a radical break from previous conceptions of the Web as a carrier of content. That is, Web 2.0 spaces do not simply transmit content according to specific communicative formats, even though this is still one of their roles. Rather, Web 2.0 spaces serve to establish the conditions within which content can be produced and shared and where the sphere of agency of users can be defined. With regards to understanding commercial Web 2.0 platform, this distinction draws a parallel with Maurizio Lazzarato’s argument that ‘in reversal of the Marxist definition, we could say that capitalism is not a world of production, but the production of worlds’ (2004: 96). Lazzarato’s exploration of contemporary forms of capitalism draws a distinction between the factory and the corporation. While the factory is about fabricating and producing objects, the corporation is about the creation of the world within which the process of manufacturing, distributing and consuming can take place (2004: 95). As Lazzarato further argues: ‘the corporation does not create objects (merchandises), but the world within which such objects can exist’. Furthermore, the corporation ‘does not create subjects (workers or consumers), but the world within which such subjects can exist’ (2004: 94). That is, the corporation creates flows of discourses, practices and materials that delineate a horizon of possibility and therefore work to create subjective norms that can be interiorized by individuals. The transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 becomes more understandable if we follow the model provided by Lazzarato, especially when it comes to the commercialization of and capitalization on users and their content. While the type of commercializing processes at stake with Web 1.0 were primarily about transforming users and their content into commodities, Web 2.0 dynamics establish the conditions within which such processes of commercialization can occur through the promotion and harnessing of user-generated content.

User-generated content, which we define as digitized objects shared across the web 2.0 network, is said to have produced a computerized ‘gift economy’ (Barbrook, 1998) through the maximization of ‘free labor’ (Terranova, 2000). The concept of gift economy refers to the open-source inspired models of collaboration that departs from proprietorial models of software (e.g. Mozilla and its open source browser Firefox), or content (e.g. Wikipedia). While volunteer online collaboration has often been viewed as revolutionizing cultural and economic production (Jenkins 2006; Benkler, 2006) and therefore as challenging a proprietary system of digital ownership and cyber-capital, Terranova’s critique of 2.0 labour also underlines the ways in which the open-source movement has been incorporated into a capitalist digital economy. As Terranova points out: ‘you do not need to be proprietary about source codes to make a profit: the code might be free, but tech support, packaging, installation software, regular upgrades, office applications and hardware are not’ (Terranova, 2000: 51). As Terranova further demonstrates, free labor has been a central component in the development of the Web:

Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labor on the Net includes the activity of building Web sites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists, and building virtual spaces on MUDs and MOOs. Far from being an ‘unreal’ empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical labor through and through, a continuous production of value that is completely immanent to the flows of the network society at large (Terranova,2000: 33).

Unpaid content production, then, is one aspect of a capitalist process focused on the ‘creation of monetary value out of knowledge/culture/affect’ (Terranova, 2000: 38). This new form of capitalism as expressed on the Internet and the Web is about nurturing, exploiting and exhausting the ‘cultural and affective production’ of the labor force (Terranova, 2000: 51). Terranova’s analysis is easily applicable to commercial Web 2.0 models, where processes of commercialization can take place at the level of users and their content. Establishing a new – and free – Facebook account lays the ground work for the growth of one’s social network. In exchange for this service, Facebook reserves the right to use information provided about users – who they are friends with, what their preferences are, what they read or consult – in order to share such information with third parties. YouTube likewise relies on freely and voluntarily produced videos to attract people and sell audiences to the advertising industry, among other marketing techniques, such as promoting partners’ videos.

Commercial Web 2.0 spaces are, however, not simply technologies of content commercialization. There is clearly a qualitative difference between the America Online (AOL) chat hosts working for free that Terranova describes (Terranova, 2000: 33) and Facebook or YouTube users. The main difference lies in how the process of alienation inserts itself within a variety of online spaces. Terranova’s investigation into what can now be considered Web 1.0 describes a process where a capitalist machine ‘nurtures, exploits and exhausts’ user-generated cultural production. In that sense, there is a process of alienation of the user from their cultural production as the content produced serves to maintain and further an economic system. Such processes are far from being absent from Web 2.0 platforms, but the ways in which the platforms re-articulate processes of alienation to users is more complex. The alienation of users from their information first takes place through a technico-legal system whereby the implementation of surveillance software is accompanied by terms of service that authorize the platform to re-use user information. For instance, while users on Facebook retain intellectual property of their content, the Facebook terms of use stipulate that:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

A second characteristic of commercial Web 2.0 platforms is that processes of alienation are kept invisible to users. A case in point is Facebook‘s Beacon. The Beacon was designed to enable more targeted advertising on the Facebook site through the sharing of users’ information with commercial third parties. The Facebook Beacon was quickly met with resistance because of privacy concerns and was changed to an opt-in system rather than a set feature of the website.[4] This software change could be interpreted as a victory against the alienation of users from the information they provide, yet this is far from being the case. The Beacon, after all, was a visual representation of processes of commercialization that are still taking place on the Facebook platform. These processes, however, increasingly take place at the back-end level and because they are invisible to users, they meet with less resistance.

A third characteristic of commercial Web 2.0 concerns the re-articulation of the dynamics of alienation to make alienation disappear altogether. What Zimmer (2008) describes as a Faustian trade-off between augmented personalized exploration and surveillance and commercialization gives way to a dynamic whereby the process of commercialization is part of providing to users augmented cultural knowledge, affect and desire, to borrow from Terranova (2000). YouTube‘s recommendations are designed to assist users in their quest for knowledge that corresponds to their interests. Facebook is about enhancing the personal socialized world of users and multiplying social exchanges through joining groups and sharing stories. Commercial Web 2.0 is about us – it is about re-presenting ourselves through the mediation of the platform. This where Web 2.0 platforms echo Lazzarato’s point that contemporary forms of capitalism is about the creation of worlds, which means the setting up of a horizon of possibilities. This also means that specific processes of subjectivation can be formulated as the crystallization of psychological, social, economic dynamics and factors that favour the formation of specific subject positions. These processes are present on Web 2.0 platforms and present us with the paradox of narrowing down the field of possibilities while creating, producing and enriching our experience of being on the Web. Commercial Web 2.0 platforms are attractive because they allow us, as users, to explore and build knowledge and social relations in an intimate, personalized way. In this dynamic, the commercialization of users and information is one of the central factors through which this enrichment takes place. As a consequence, alienation disappears, as in the Web 2.0 worlds there is no contradiction anymore between the marketing of user information and the subjective enrichment of users: what used to be two separate processes are now one in the augmentation of social and cultural factors. Third-party advertising is reinscribed as cultural capital produced by the platform for the user through personalized recommendations. The role of the platform, in that sense, is to set up the context, or world, within which such re-articulations can take place.

There is need to further examine this third process of re-articulation of alienation within commercial Web 2.0 platforms, and this requires further analysis into the ways in which users come to exist as subjects online. The concept of subjectivation as explored by Guattari (1989), Guattari and Rolnik (2007) and Lazzaratto (2004) points out that what is unproblematically considered as an individual subject in online spaces is actually the ‘momentary stabilization and enclosure’ (Lazzarato, 2004: 57) of a specific position articulated through a range of heterogeneous forces. Subjectivity, as Guattari declares, is fabricated and modeled under a social regime (Guattari and Rolnik, 2007: 46). The concept of the platform can enrich our understanding of subjectivation as it brings in a technocultural dimension that helps us to acknowledge that the user cannot be equated with a human actor – it is actually a site of articulation between the technocultural dynamics present through the platform and human actors. In turn, the hybridity of the user points out how processes of subjectivation on Web 2.0 worlds are both highly personalized and standardized. That is, the representation of ourselves takes place through a platform’s universal algorithmic logic. As users, we input personal information into the platform, and in turn, the platform represents us on the user-interface as the aggregation of bits and pieces of images, texts, sounds, videos, and links. The user-interface becomes the site where the exploration and extension of ourselves, our knowledge, culture and affect is negotiated through a technocultural mediation. In that regard, a major change between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is the rise of the first-person perspective. In the 1.0 environment, the drive was towards providing users with an overall, universalist view of Web spaces. The site map, for instance, emerged as an essential component of websites. With Web 2.0, the site map, the universalist perspective, has entirely disappeared as information is constantly re-classified through personalization and customization. Our relation to others and to what populates commercial Web 2.0 spaces is always realized from an individualized perspective. While Wikipedia is about the sum of individual knowledge to get as close to a universalist perspective as possible, commercial Web 2.0 are about the creating processes of socialized individualization whereby the sum of all knowledge is parsed out through customization and individuation. In that sense, the process of subjectivation on commercial Web 2.0 worlds is locative: it is the double logic and the inseparability of finding and being found, of locating ourselves and our personalized network. Locative, in that sense, does not refer to the technical feature of handheld devices, but to a process of creating experiences for users not only in terms of their geographic locale, but in terms of defining and refining their ‘level of existential, inhabited, experienced and lived place’ (Bleeker, 2006). Commercial Web 2.0 platforms help construct worlds and set up the subjectivation processes through which users can inhabit and explore these worlds.

4. World Mapping

The commercialization of users and their content on commercial Web 2.0 worlds is reintegrated as part of a productive dynamic that enable specific modes of subjectivation and define the individualized and localized relationships between users and the technocultural world around them. The question, in turn, is about understanding how different platforms enable the production of worlds. How can we map commercial Web 2.0 worlds, and therefore build possibilities of critical intervention? We suggest that one entry point towards mapping Web 2.0 worlds is through platforms and through the visualization of the many connections operated by the platforms between users, content and protocols. Understanding these connections at the technical level helps to identify the many autonomous and sometimes heterogeneous processes that authorize these very connections. In that sense, Guattari’s exploration of the constitution of contemporary forms of capitalism as deploying a range of semiotic regimes is important in developing a methodological framework for Web 2.0. Guattari argues that the instruments through which ‘integrated world capitalism’ comes to stabilize and expand itself involve four semiotic regimes: economic, legal, techno-scientific and semiotics of subjectivation[5] (Guattari, 1989; 41). Such typology of processes and articulations of heterogeneous elements can be easily adapted to commercial Web 2.0: the economic logic of attracting large audiences within a delineated online space is supported by both a legal system that allows for the circulation of information from users to commercial entities and a technico-scientific assemblage of platforms and protocols that render such circulation of information feasible. Furthermore, semiotics of subjectivation in the case of commercial Web 2.0 platforms work towards the stabilization of the production of subjectivities within specific user modes, representational interfaces and algorithm used to create personalized and socialized recommendations that seamlessly articulate economic and cultural processes.

The unpacking of the combination of Guattari’s four semiotic systems as they traverse and shape commercial Web 2.0 platforms can be conducted through a range of methodologies and approaches. Our specific interests lie in developing a critical methodological approach that starts with the techno-scientific, that is, the platform, and that focuses in particular on the circulation of information online. A platform-focused methodology allows for a grounded approach to the formation of Web 2.0 worlds. In particular, our intent is to avoid the trap of trying to define Web 2.0 worlds as broad structures that encapsulate specific issues and moments. Rather, there is a need to develop an approach that pays attention to the ways in which Web 2.0 worlds are constantly re-articulating and stabilizing disparate elements. A platform is the embodiment of a Web 2.0 world, as specific articulations of protocols are allowed by, enact and ground economic, legal and subjectivation processes in specific technocultural contexts. The platform, as such, realizes possibilities through the deployment of protocological modules. In turn, these modules are about the mining, transformation, production and exchange of pieces of information according to the regimes of localization, customization and socialized individualization.

A platform-based methodology facilitates a process of making visible the ways in which protocols are articulated so as to channel information in specific ways and thus enact specific economic, legal, and cultural dynamics. In other words, a methodology that would witness the unfolding of the production of worlds via commercial Web 2.0 platforms would be of considerable benefit in terms of identifying specific sites of stabilization. The first step in developing such a methodology to re-envision the Web requires a move beyond, and below the user interface. That is, we need to challenge our perception of the Web as rooted within the visual aesthetics of the user interface. This is all the more crucial and challenging as on proprietary and closed websites such as Facebook, the interface becomes a limiting factor as our only point of entry is through the first-person perspective of our own network. We can never have access to the totality of the information available on Facebook via the interface, and this limits our analysis. Indeed, the user perspective creates a specific worldview of Web 2.0 – one that is localized, grounded in and delineated by a specific visual regime. Adopting a platform perspective helps overcoming the limitation of the user worldview so as to understand broader subjectivation processes, and re-localize users within the visible and invisible elements that compose Web 2.0 worlds.

As the role of the platform is to enact and realize Web 2.0 worlds through the articulation of protocols, it becomes necessary to dissect these protocological articulations. Platforms perform connections via protocols among “objects”: users, pieces of content, pieces of information produced through recommendation and personalization software. These connections enable the formation of the relationships that populate Web 2.0 worlds. In other words, Web 2.0 platforms establish the channels through which information can circulate and the challenge lies in developing tools to track, map and visualize such channels, from the protocols that enable them to their effects on stabilizing specific modes of being online. Such an approach has roots in the critical aesthetics of software studies – for instance, Fuller’s Webstalker (2003) as an alternative Web browser was an important step in understanding how user perceptions of what the Web is are constructed through specific visual regimes at the level of the user interface. Such an approach also stems from info-visualization as the production of tools to render visible previously invisible processes.

This critical approach to Web 2.0 platforms is based on disaggregation. Disaggregation as a method through which to strip, parse and rip the platform into its components is a useful approach, albeit one that needs to be adapted to the Web 2.0 environment. Indeed, most disaggregation tools rely on Web 1.0 protocols accessible to users, such as hyperlinks, domain names, or metatags. There are user-accessible protocols in Web 2.0, and those can be understood as traffic tags. Traffic tags are pieces of identification that are attached to a Web object: a user, a video, a picture each have, for instance, a distinct ID number on Web 2.0 platforms. Traffic tags can be human-generated, such as the title of video, or the real name of a user as they appear on the user-interface, or the user tags that describe how an object belongs to a class of object (i.e. “X’s wedding” or “election 2008″). Traffic tags are also computer-generated: unique identification numbers are assigned to a YouTube video, as well as to users on Facebook. Traffic tags allow not only for the recognition of objects within Web 2.0 platforms, but also are used by protocols to allow objects to circulate across platforms. For instance, when a user presses the “Share on Facebook” button after watching a video on YouTube, the ID number of the video will reappear in the Facebook source code of the user’s page. The current challenge thus lies in identifying and following traffic tags associated with Web objects so as to see how information circulates within and across Web 2.0 platforms. This will give clues as to how cultural processes that are traditionally only visible at the level of the user-interface are dependent on the software interfaces. In turn, this disaggregation of the articulation of Web 2.0 protocols will serve to identify techno-scientific semiotics and the ways in which they are associated and articulated with legal and economic semiotics and semiotics of subjectivation.

Such an approach is a challenge for researchers accustomed to working at the level of the user interface. Yet, moving from the user interface to the software interface is promising in terms of not only analyzing the technocultural economy of commercial Web 2.0 worlds through the mapping of the unfolding of protocological assemblages, but also with regards to using commercial Web 2.0 in non-commercial ways. Of particular interest are the Application Programming Interfaces (API) which have become a central feature of Web 2.0 spaces. APIs allows software programs to connect to Web 2.0 platforms and databases and undertake specific tasks. APIs offer a way to access information and tags that bypass the limits of the user interface. Therefore, their potential as ways to develop critical methodological tools should be explored. The goal would be to create new visualizations, new geographies – a map of where objects flow, where they migrate, where they are reshaped and re-circulated. The mapping of the connectivities and disconnectivities of Web 2.0 platforms could thus make use of techno-scientific semiotics as an entry point for understanding the production of Web 2.0 worlds.

Critical interventions into commercial Web 2.0 platforms are needed if we are to recognize the cultural importance and critical potentials of Web 2.0. Many instances in code studies and software studies show that such interventions can take different forms, from radical ruptures to aesthetic experiments and methodological tools. It is crucial, however, to not to be too quick in formulating critical judgments, and to understand the power dynamics in commercial Web 2.0 as both repressive and productive. That is, the ontogenesis of Web 2.0 is about the creation of inhabitable worlds within which users can exist and extend themselves according to specific technocultural logics. The challenge, then, lies in formulating alternatives that make use of specific protocological articulations and divert them so that they are not about stabilizing a system, but rather about creating other possibilities. We are hoping that the above framework provides a step towards enabling the mapping of protocological formation on Web 2.0 platforms.

Authors’ Biographies

Ganaele Langlois is Associate Director at the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University (Toronto, Canada, www.infoscapelab.ca and Assistant Professor of Communication in the Faculty of Criminology, Justice and Policy Studies at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (Oshawa, Canada). Her research interests build on software studies, Actor-network theory, and Guattari’s mixed semiotics to study the critical, cultural and political dimensions of online participatory cultures. Her publications have appeared in the Canadian Journal of Communication and New Media & Society.

Fenwick McKelvey is a PhD student in the Communication and Culture program at Ryerson and York Universities (Toronto, Canada) and a Research Associate at the Infoscape Research Lab. His research explores the intersection of network management with regimes of human governance. He holds a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship.

Greg Elmer is Bell Globemedia Research Chair and Director of the Infoscape Research lab at Ryerson University, Toronto. Greg’s research and teaching focus on new media and politics, information and communication technologies, computer networks, and media globalization. Greg’s scholarly publications have appeared in the peer reviewed journals First Monday, New Media & Society, Screen, Convergence, and Scan. Greg has published a number of books including, most recently with Andy Opel, Preempting Dissent: The Politics of an Inevitable Future, http://www.arbeiterring.com/new/preempting.html, (2008, ARP Press).

Dr. Kenneth Werbin is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Studies and Journalism at Wilfrid Laurier University-Brantford Campus in Ontario, Canada. His research focuses on the security and surveillance dynamics surrounding the automated aggregation and circulation of personal biographic content across social media platforms.

Notes

[1] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook for a timeline and resources on privacy issues and Facebook [back]

[2] Our working definition of the Deleuzo-Guattarian approach to ontogenesis is best summarized by Ansell-Pearson: “it is the process itself that is to be regarded as primary. This means that ontogenesis is no longer treated as dealing with the genesis of the individual but rather designates the becoming of being” (1999, p. 90).
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[3] http://www.eetimes.com/encyclopedia/defineterm.jhtml?term=platform
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[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon
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[5] Semiotics of subjectivation do not particularly belong to one category, as opposed to legal, economic and techno-scientific semiotics. Rather, they include a wide range of processes and flows that, in the case of the capitalist machine, work to create norms which individuals can interiorize (Guattari,1989: 24).
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References

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Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale: Yale University Press, 2006).

Bleeker, Julian. ‘Locative Media: A Brief Bibliography and Taxonomy of GPS-Enabled Locative Media’, Leonardo: Electronic Almanac 14.3 (2006). http://www.leoalmanac.org/journal/vol_14/lea_v14_n03-04/jbleecker.html

Boyd, Danah. ‘Facebook‘s Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence’, Convergence 14 (2008): 13-20.

Chun, Wendy. ‘On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge’. Grey Room 18 (2005): 26-51.

Cramer, Florian and Matthew Fuller, ‘Interface’, in Fuller, Matthew (Ed) Software Studies: a Lexicon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 149-152.

Elmer, Greg. ‘The Vertical (Layered) Net’ in David Silver (Ed.) Critical Cyberculture Studies: New Directions (New York: NYU Press, 2006): 159-167.

Elmer, G., Ryan, P. M., Devereaux, Z., Langlois, G., Redden, J., & McKelvey, F. ‘Election Bloggers: Methods for Determining Political Influence’ First Monday 12.4 (2007). http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_4/elmer/index.html.

Fuller, M. (Ed.). Software Studies: A Lexicon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).

Fuller, M. Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software (Brooklyn, NY, USA: Autonomedia, 2003).

Galloway, A. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).

Garrido, M. & Halavais, A. ‘Mapping networks of support for the Zapatista movement’ in M. McCaughey and M. Ayers (Eds.) Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice. (London: Routledge, 2003).

Grimelmann, J. ‘Regulation by Software’, Yale Law Journal 114 (2005): 1719-1758.

Grusin, R. ‘Location, Location, Location: Desktop Real Estate and the Cultural Economy of the World Wide Web’, Convergence 6.1 (2000): 48-61.

Guattari, Felix. Les Troies Ecologies (Paris: Galilee, 1989).

Guattari, Felix and Suely Rolnik. Micropolitiques (Paris: Les empecheurs de penser en rond).

Hayles, N. K. ‘Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis’, Poetics Today, 25.1 (2004): 67-89.

Jenkins, H. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

Jenkins, Henry and Tiziana Terranova. ‘What’s so Significant about Social Networking? Web 2.0 and its Critical Potentials’, International Communication Association Conference (May 2007).

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Jørgensen, A. H., & Udsen, L. E. ‘From Calculation to Culture: A Brief History of the Computer Interface’ in K. B. Jensen (Ed.), Interface://Culture – The World Wide Web as Political Resource and Aesthetic Form (Frederiksberg: Samfundsletteratur Press/NORDICOM, 2005): 39-64.

Lazzarato, Maurizio. Les Révolutions du Capitalisme (Paris: Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2004).

Lessig, L. Code: Version 2.0 (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

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Marres, Noortje and Richard Rogers. ‘Recipe for Tracing the Fate of Issues and Their Publics on the Web’ in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Eds.), Making Things Public (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005): 922-935.

O’Reilly, T. ‘What is Web 2.0′, (2005), http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html.

Schneider,S. & K. Foot. ‘Web sphere analysis:An approach to studying online action’ in C. Hines (Ed.) Virtual Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005): 157-170.

Turkle, S. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Touchstone, 1997). Vossen, G., & Hagemann, S. Unleashing Web 2.0: From Concepts to Creativity. (Amsterdam: Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann, 2007).

Terranova, Tiziana. ‘Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy’, Social Text 18.2 (2000): 33-58.

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Dr Nayantara Pothen
Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney

Introduction

The Internet has been a popular method for communication and collaboration across far-flung sites for some time, and its potential for enhancing participatory democracy has been much commented on. With the emergence of so-called Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005), the interactive and collaborative capabilities of the Internet have greatly increased, with still uncertain social, political and intellectual effects. This paper emerges out of an interest in exploring the possible implications of Web 2.0 for the practice of humanities research. Scholars in the humanities have traditionally been dependent on the written word—on the production of intellectually dense discourse—and, in this producerly mode, they tend to be individualist, sole researchers. How can they respond to the challenges posed by Web 2.0 and its seemingly irresistible promotion of a participatory, expressive, and highly visual mode of cultural production?

This article provides a critical (self-)analysis of diverCities: A Global Collaboration Space for Intercultural Dialogue, a digital humanities experiment. Sponsored by UNESCO, the project involved the conceptualisation and development of a customised Web 2.0 site to promote intercultural dialogue within and across major cities around the world. The project was a collaborative effort of an interdisciplinary team of cultural researchers from the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney, the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore, together with e-research specialists from the Archaeological Computing Laboratory (ACL) at the University of Sydney, who applied Heurist, an Open Source Collaborative Knowledge Space (CKS) for humanities scholars, to create diverCities, a prototype website that was used as a practical tool for the exploration and trialling of new, web-mediated practices of intercultural dialogue.[1]

Although it was in the research team’s mind to eventually launch diverCities in the public domain of the Internet, the project never reached beyond the prototype phase: this public launch will never happen because the project turned out to be inviable, and not just because of financial restrictions, as we will describe below. In this sense, the project can be described as a failure. However, the very process of developing the diverCities platform can be seen as a distributed, collaborative and interdisciplinary form of research which involved “getting inside” Web 2.0 to explore its possible workings and uses, without knowing in advance where this might lead us. In this sense, the project was a sharp departure from more conventional humanities research projects, which have more linear and cumulative protocols of knowledge production. For most of the cultural researchers in the team, it was their first foray into the so-called digital humanities (e.g. McCarty, 2005) enabling them to consider in a concentrated manner how Internet-based knowledge production might affect the practice of research. This proved an illuminating experience. In theory, the social participatory and interactive aspects of the digital facilities that were conceptualised as integral to, and thus built into the diverCities site should have allowed for a greater collaborative experience for the research team. In practice, however, the project demonstrated that becoming a “digital scholar” would require major adjustments in the established intellectual habitus of humanities scholarship. (For a discussion of these issues see the website Digital Scholarship in the Humanties (Spiro, 2009)).

David Beer and Roger Burrows argue, following Scott Lash, that research into the workings of Web 2.0 will have to ‘come from inside the information itself’ (Beer and Burrows, 2007: 4.3). They suggest that researchers need to be ‘inside the networks, online communities, and collaborative movements to be able to see what is going on and describe it’. They further remark that once inside these networks, research could explore the use of Web 2.0 applications as research tools, for example by constructing virtual ethnographies of communities and practices of users of social networking sites (Beer and Burrows, 2007: 4.4). The researcher would thus have to become a participant observer within such communities, to “get inside” them to explore the interactive potentials of such sites.

However, their suggestions are limited to the study of existing social networking sites, such as Facebook or YouTube. By contrast, our project involved the construction of a new, purpose-built Web 2.0 application, with the promotion of an explicit political and intellectual objective in mind (namely, “intercultural dialogue”). Through the process of developing the diverCities platform, then, we have an empirical case for examining not only the potentials, but also the problems and tensions emanating from the application of Web 2.0 digital technologies not only for a desired social and cultural purpose, but also for humanities scholarship more generally. In this sense, our project goes further than the research direction proposed by Beer and Burrows, in at least two ways.

First, our research does not focus only on the actual use of a Web 2.0 application, but also on the challenges and dilemmas associated with the customised construction of such an application, including issues related to its technological capabilities and its intended social uses. Indeed, one of the rationales of the project was the understanding that for a good Web 2.0 application to work, technology capability and social use need to be thought through together (Morley, 2007). The process of developing diverCities gives us a concrete case with which to illuminate this crucial interconnection of technology and use.

Secondly, the process of working on diverCities provides us with some practical evidence with which to explore the complicated contradictions associated with these changes, and reflect more broadly on their consequences for digital humanities research. DiverCities provides a site for exploring these issues. At the same time, the experience of diverCities, as a Web 2.0 application, also gives us an opportunity to assess the complex and contradictory discourse of “intercultural dialogue”, the promotion of which has been the purpose of diverCities from the outset.

Intercultural Dialogue

The rise to prominence of ‘intercultural dialogue’ as an issue for public policy and governance is associated with the heightened recognition of the conflictive consequences of transnational migration and globalization, which has raised the degree of cultural diversity of societies to unprecedented levels, and the worsening global political climate after September 11, 2001.

On a global level, UNESCO has made ‘intercultural dialogue’ one of its key priorities since the adoption of its Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity in November 2001. As UNESCO puts it on their website, ‘Equitable exchange and dialogue among civilizations, cultures and peoples, based on mutual understanding and respect and the equal dignity of all cultures is the essential prerequisite for constructing social cohesion, reconciliation among peoples and peace among nations.’[2]

The European Union declared 2008 the European Year for Intercultural Dialogue. The European Commission’s Agenda for Culture in A Globalizing World, released in 2007, identified intercultural dialogue ‘as a tool contributing to the governance of cultural diversity within European societies, trans-nationally across European countries and internationally with other world regions’ (quoted in European Institute for Comparative Cultural Research, 2008: 4). The Council of Europe’s White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue: Living Together As Equals in Dignity advanced the conviction that ‘it is our common responsibility to achieve a society where we can live together as equals in dignity’ (Council of Europe, 2008: 5). Intercultural dialogue has an important role to play in this regard, as ‘it allows us to prevent ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural divides’ (Council of Europe, 2008: 4).

The recent salience of discourses of intercultural dialogue as a key recipe for peaceful global conviviality is interesting because it signals a recognition of the failure of older, more modernist approaches to global cultural diversity, which have tended to be guided by long-discredited (but still popular), static and homogenising concepts of identity, nation and culture (Erikson, 2001). By contrast intercultural dialogue, by emphasising the crucial importance of communication and exchange across lines of difference, foregrounds a more dynamic, open-ended, and processual landscape of living together-in-difference. It emphasises the positive potentials of hybridity, cultural polyvocality and dialogic engagement with the other as ingredients for cosmopolitan democracy in a global multicultural age, as suggested by theorists such as Beck (2006), Benhabib (2002) and others. In this sense, the world of global cultural policy has woken up to the realities and requirements of the network society writ large, where cultural capital and social cohesion depend crucially on the degree of interconnectedness between people. In this context intercultural dialogue is seen as essential for the world today. As the Council of Europe’s White Paper dramatically puts it, ‘Only dialogue allows people to live in unity in diversity… The absence of dialogue deprives everyone of the benefit of new cultural openings, necessary for personal and social development in a globalised world’ (Council of Europe, 2008: 16).

Nevertheless, the White Paper also admits that there is a notable lack of clarity about what intercultural dialogue might mean in practice. UNESCO observes that ‘there are many open questions about the concept and practice of intercultural dialogue, what it means, the conditions which allow it to happen, the methods and tools developed in this regard and the policies to be put in place to foster such efforts’ (UNESCO, 2007: 2). Moreover, as the White Paper admits, ‘intercultural dialogue cannot be prescribed by law’ (Council of Europe, 2008: 5). Instead, ‘it must retain its character as an open invitation’ (Council of Europe, 2008: 5) – an invitation which ideally everyone would take up. Thus, intercultural dialogue can be seen as a Foucauldian technology of freedom, a cultural tool for governance ‘at a distance’ (Rose, 1999: 49).

In other words, even though intercultural dialogue is envisaged as a universal practice to be conducted by all citizens, it has to be a process from below; governments cannot force it to happen, they can only educate or cajole people to engage in it. Behind governmental intercultural dialogue policies is the belief that ‘while cross-fertilization of cultures is possible, it is not automatic’ (UNESCO, 2007: 3). In this paradoxical situation intercultural dialogue remains a programmatic proposition for social engineering, with policy makers putting huge efforts and resources into strategies to turn principles and concepts into practice through concrete, experimental projects. DiverCities was one such project through which a practicable meaning of intercultural dialogue might be tested. In conceptualising the project, the research team was inspired by some of the interesting parallels that can be drawn between the discourse of intercultural dialogue and that of Web 2.0. Both instances involve an imagined world of large-scale, networked interrelationality where dispersed participants actively interconnect and join in an equal, open conversation with one another, engaging in information-sharing and mutual collaboration or understanding. Equally, both discursive realms are infused with a rhetoric of promise and perhaps excessive expectations. The diverCities project was a practical response to this promise.

Bringing Web 2.0 and Intercultural Dialogue Together: diverCities as a ‘Dialogue Space’

In a formal sense, one can imagine the technological capabilities of Web 2.0 to be conducive to facilitating intercultural dialogue: Web 2.0 is able to create physically and socially dispersed, yet virtually interconnected sites, enabling ‘new cross-border spaces for dialogue’ (European Institute for Comparative Cultural Research, 2008: XIII). The diverCities project was designed to create such a web-based dialogue space.[3]

The project was exploratory in a strong sense of the word. It did not start out with a preconceived idea, or even consensus, of what the outcome might be. The only vision that guided the project was to bring participants living in a range of cities in the world together to engage in intercultural dialogue through active contribution to content creation and discussion. To enable the integration of local knowledge and transnational intercultural dialogue, participants would be recruited and content would be created and exchanged in the three cities where the researchers were located – Sydney, Mumbai and Singapore.

The research team reasoned that diverCities could enhance the capacity for people in different cities to be informed about and learn from each other. While there are obvious points of connection between Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney – for example, each city’s history has been thoroughly, if variously, enmeshed with that of the British Empire – people living in these cities today do not usually have much knowledge about each other. A central assumption of the project was that while each city is different and has its own unique characteristics, most world cities have equivalent experiences and are commonly engaged in equivalent urban practices, which they share with human beings living in other cities. DiverCities would encourage people to think beyond the boundaries of their own cities and find resonances with the lives and experiences of people with whom they might not find much in common. In this way diverCities would enlarge people’s imaginations and increase the potential for global solidarity through the nurturing of new exchanges across geographical divides—intercultural dialogue on a large, transnational scale!

This, at least, was the grand and abstract vision behind the project. In the following we will describe some of the deliberations of the research team in the concrete process of conceiving diverCities. In these deliberations technological expertise and knowledge provided by the ACL digital humanities experts and programmers was brought into conversation with the combined broad cultural research expertise of cultural researchers from the three cities.

Extending out of Beer and Burrows’ suggestions, cited earlier, that research into Web 2.0 practices would require researchers to ‘get inside the information’, the role of the research team was raised very early in the project. More specifically, the project took the team members beyond their comfort zone of individual writerly scholarship towards a collaborative and interactive process of knowledge production, whose outcomes were uncertain and open-ended. In this sense, the research team itself became what Ned Rossiter (2006) and Geert Lovink (2008) call an ‘organised network’, whose own practice of intercultural dialogue through the construction of the diverCities platform was subject to self-examination.

Building Content: Users and Contributors

The one defining characteristic of technologies, applications or practices classified as Web 2.0, in Michael Hardey’s words, is the fact that ‘users possess a new degree of agency in constructing their engagement with resources and other users so that it is easy to form and interact with social and technological networks’ (Hardey, 2007, 869). DiverCities was designed to capitalise on this principle of user as agent. Simply by contributing to the site, the user would have the opportunity to engage in a process of intercultural dialogue, both within and across the cities – or at least, this was how the research team imagined the user. The idea was that the user would be both a producer and a consumer of the content, what Axel Bruns (2008) calls a ‘produser’. As Bruns suggests, this model of user-led content generation, characteristic of Web 2.0, would harness ‘the collected, collective intelligence of all participants, and manages…to direct their contributions to where they are best able to make a positive impact’ (Bruns, 2008: 1). In the case of diverCities, that positive impact would have to do with the democratic enhancement of intercultural dialogue.

However, the conceptual dependence of the site on user-generated content created some problems for the project. How to get the site started? How can the user be initiated into the dialogue space? Where can s/he find their bearings once inside the dialogue space? In the first instance, the research team itself acted as a community of users; they themselves took on the responsibility to generate content.

The team debated long and hard about the best way to thematise “intercultural dialogue” for the site. To begin engaging with each other, users would first have to enunciate themselves. There needed to be a collective knowledge base on which grounds dialogue and exchange could take place. For this to happen, it was decided that diverCities would capture the evolving (multi)cultural dynamics of cities around the world—beginning with Sydney, Mumbai and Singapore—through the input of narratives that tell stories about the experience of living together in diversity in the participating cities: the ‘hybrid’ identities of their citizens and inhabitants, the different groups and communities they have formed, their memories and histories of living with diversity, relevant major events that have become key signposts in a city’s historical record, people’s personal and political responses (including policies) to the challenges of living together in diversity, and so on. Lines of difference and diversity, and hence the focal points of intercultural dialogue, would vary from city to city, depending on their distinctive historical, social and political contexts, and it was thought that building up collective intelligence on this variety of local circumstances and histories would facilitate cross-cultural knowledge and mutual understanding. As a Web 2.0 tool diverCities would operate as an open repository for all these stories, and enable users not only to add their own stories, but also enter into dialogue with other users by sharing and exchanging experiences both within and across the participating cities.

One of the challenges facing the research team’s aim in teasing out the interconnections between the three cities, those shared urban experiences, was to ensure that the trajectories through which users would enter the dialogue space were not overly pre-determined, as this would obviously limit the possibilities for intercultural dialogue. It was also equally important that users enter the dialogue space in ways that would facilitate engagement and dialogue across the cities. To use the cities themselves as points of entry into the dialogue space would therefore be inadequate, as it would simply reinforce the sense of separation the three cities have from each other. Making ‘Sydney’, ‘Mumbai’ and ‘Singapore’ the virtual gateways into the site would discourage users from exploring stories from cities other than the particular city they had chosen to enter. As an alternative, therefore, the research team decided to use generic entry-points into the site that would emphasise what people across different cities have in common rather than what separates them. These generic entry-points, labelled with verbs such as ‘belonging’, ‘eating’, ‘believing’, ‘working’, ‘inhabiting’, ‘travelling’ etc., refer to human practices that are universal but are usually expressed through specific cultural forms, rituals, and traditions in particular contexts. For example, wherever they live, people have to eat, but under which circumstances, where and what they eat, how they cook and present their food, and so on, has particular, city-specific peculiarities. These entry-points will lead users into lists of related stories (e.g. about ‘eating’), and from there onto other stories, taking users deeper into the web of stories and virtually navigating them through any of the three cities. At any one point, users could comment on a story they read, or add their own story.

As a consequence, stories are not confined to a single entry-point; instead, they may be accessed through a number of different entry-points. For example, a story about the 2005 Cronulla race riots in Sydney might be found through the ‘belonging’ entry-point, but may also be found in ‘believing’ (given that it involved Muslim youth). Moreover, users do not have to go back to one of the generic entry-points to add a new story; they can do so from any point (i.e. story) in the network. Thus, the linking of stories to each other can be performed by all users of the dialogue space, not just the original author of the story. For example, a user from Mumbai may decide to link the Cronulla story with a story of the 1992 Hindu-Muslim riots in that city, allowing all users to reflect on intercultural conflict more generally. The list of generic entry-points is also open-ended; new ones can always be added. In this way, users can choose to enter the space and/or view the interconnected collection of stories through any number of different, non-linear, yet linked, pathways of their own choosing.

Stories, while the primary unit of content, were not envisaged to be the only unit of content in the diverCities dialogue space. In order to reflect the participatory logic so central to both Web 2.0 and intercultural dialogue, the diverCities platform would encourage the user to actively engage with the content and site in a number of different ways. Thus, each story can be supplemented with any number of images and other related resources which serve as illustrations or further information about the original story. Images may include photographs or film clips. Other resources could refer to bibliographic references, newspaper reports, websites, songs, and so on. Any user can add an image or other resource to a story – adding to and enlarging the pool of information and materials surrounding a story is simply one of a number of ways in which users can engage and enter into a dialogue with the content.

Users can also interact with the stories they read more directly by adding a comment or responding to a comment, as is common in the blogosphere. This function provides a space for user-generated discussion of a story, opening up the site to a greater level of user participation. Ideally, this would lead to a threaded discussion among users that might in itself be seen as intercultural dialogue in practice, especially when users from different backgrounds and different cities contribute. For example, a story on the notion of belonging within a Sydney context produced a comment from one of the Singaporean team members that it is not possible to translate ‘belonging’ into Malay. This generated a brief discussion on the formulation of belonging, if no direct translation into English exists. The issue of exclusion, or ‘not belonging’, set by the language limitations of the site might then be raised—does this mean that users are only able to discuss English-mediated experiences of belonging?

In this way, research team members participated in a form of intercultural dialogue directly within the site, as they made links between the stories either through contributing a story of their own, adding an additional resource or image, or by commenting on specific stories.

The discussion about the linguistic specificity of concepts such as ‘belonging’ led to a broader questioning of the text-based format of stories. When the research team started to envisage the diverCities platform as a collaborative dialogue space, it defined a story as a piece of text. Images were secondary and could only be added as an extra or supplementary resource. The question asked was why couldn’t stories be image-based particularly given the proliferation and success of user-generated image-based sites such as YouTube and Flickr.

The textual bias of diverCities reflects the dominant practice of scholarly communication within the humanities, where knowledge and understanding has traditionally been transmitted almost exclusively through the medium of writing. Obviously this sits uneasily with multimedia modes of digital story-telling (Arthur, 2008) that have emerged around the world as an engaging way for ordinary people to tell their own stories on the Web (e.g. the Australian Centre for the Moving Image’s Digital Storytelling program.)[4] There’s no reason why diverCities could not expand its concept of story to include different formats; in technological terms this would not be difficult. The reliance on text and writing, however, also has wider epistemological ramifications, with important implications for the meaning of “intercultural dialogue” as a cultural technology.

Regulating Content: Democratic Deficit?

This brings us to the rhetoric of democratisation that has emerged around Web 2.0 (Beer & Burrows, 2007) and, by extension, the much-touted rise of the “produser” (Bruns, 2008) or “the cult of the amateur” (Keen, 2007), and the removal of the professional gatekeeper. For the diverCities‘ research team, this situation posed a profound dilemma, which revealed some of the ambivalences and contradictions adhering to the governmental goal of democratic intercultural dialogue.

At one level, the dilemma posed itself as a matter of quality control. Research team members felt it was important that the intellectual integrity of the stories and of the dialogue space was maintained: the site should not be a free-for-all for all types of story and comment, which—so the research team feared—might lead to irrelevant or inappropriate content. If the site was to encourage intercultural dialogue, care should be taken that that purpose was not diluted and the seriousness of the site was safeguarded.

Apart from quality control however, research team members also raised the issues of user security and political responsibility. One of the concerns put forward was that while diverCities was all about utilizing and integrating the democratic possibilities of the Internet for the purpose of intercultural dialogue, the on-the-ground reality of cities such as Mumbai needs to be considered. In a place where there is a very real potential for inter-communal trouble, diverCities has the potential to exacerbate this, for example if inflammatory stories against a particular group (e.g. Muslims) were posted. How do we deal with such a risk?

In practical terms, establishing a procedure of user filtration/moderation for diverCities would have been an enormous resourcing issue – a common limitation faced by many digital projects – which was beyond the horizon of the research team. More important were the implications of these issues of content control for the notion of online democracy. Clearly, the democratic possibilities of Web 2.0, as touted by its supporters, can run up against complex political and intellectual barriers. For better or worse, the need for policing the process of content generation became an inevitable element in the research team’s deliberations. The notion that everyone could, should or would simply participate proved to be a populist illusion: in this light, it wouldn’t do to simply celebrate notions of participatory democracy as liberating or resistive of prevailing power structures, as is too often the case in debates about Web 2.0 networks. Instead, as Lovink has pointed out, ‘internal power relations within networks’ need to be ‘placed on the agenda’: not just their political legitimations, but also the way in which they might be organized (Lovink, 2008: 241). This insight has serious implications also for intercultural dialogue.

The felt need for regulating the content of diverCities is an indication of the limits of the potential for intercultural dialogue to be a spontaneous and free-flowing process. It transpires that an intrinsic paradox lies a the heart of intercultural dialogue as a governmental ideal: the goal is to enhance an inclusive, democratic, harmonious and cosmopolitan society, but the suspicion is that there will always be people (e.g. racists) who will derail that project, who should therefore be excluded from the process of intercultural dialogue itself. But aren’t these people precisely the ones most in need of a dosage of learning to respect and accept the other?

Once again, the gap between ideal and practical application is brought to the fore. In a concrete way the project illuminated issues raised by political philosophers such as Iris Marion Young about the problematic of multicultural democracy (Young: 2000): can there be a public sphere where everyone, especially those who are different, can raise their voice in an open and equal conversation, or is intercultural dialogue among dispersed and diverse constituencies only possible if orchestrated from above?

Engaging Content: Dynamism and Stagnation

In keeping with the idea of cities are porous, heterogeneous and constantly evolving places (Amin & Thrift, 2002), the research team felt that it was important to avoid a rigid structure for the organization of data and information in the diverCities repository of stories. The focus would be on the harvesting of stories from multiple perspectives and many different points of view, with maximum opportunity for users to upload their own stories. The dynamic capabilities of Web 2.0, especially the blurring of the boundaries of production and consumption of content, were perfectly suited to translate this open-ended and collaborative vision of the project into a digital ‘dialogue space’.

In practice, however, this dynamism was not fully realised. Despite the best efforts of the research team, any sort of momentum was hard to sustain. Members of the research team had other commitments they needed to consider and return to. The team were also spread across three cities, and the absence of face-to-face contact was not offset by the opportunities afforded by digital technology for discussion and engagement (apart from email the research team also “met” through video conferencing facilities).

For example, a three-day workshop held in Sydney brought all team members together physically and provided them with the opportunity to further conceptualise and test the diverCities platform. This intense period of focused activity was a great success and it was at this stage, when the team was assembled together in time and space, that much of the site was populated with content and comments. This raises an interesting question for the use of Web 2.0 in public research. The technology being used is not site-specific, it can be accessed anywhere as long as users have access to the Internet. Similarly, in the case of the diverCities dialogue space, team members did not need to be in Sydney to access and navigate the site; this was possible in their home cities. However, the level of engagement significantly dropped off once team members returned to their own cities. Little content was added, and virtually no comments were made about other team members’ stories. Even though the team was very enthusiastic about the project and its aims of using Web 2.0 technologies to create an interactive platform for collaborative knowledge production and exchange, engagement with the digital “dialogue space” was not sustained – dynamism made way for stagnation. At first glance then a fair assessment of the diverCities dialogue space might be that it has essentially failed.

Perhaps, however, a shift in thinking is required in the meaning of failure with regard to Web 2.0 applications. Within the wider context of social software, the experience of diverCities is not unusual. According to social media commentator, Clay Shirky, ‘The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don’t pan out’(Shirky, 2008). Rather than seeing failure as a definitive end-point, fellow social media commentator Suw Charman-Anderson (2008) extends Shirky’s argument further and proposes:

these failures – which are common, but largely unexamined and unpublished because no one likes to admit they failed – are part and parcel of the process of negotiating how we can use these new tools…Sadly, we don’t often get a glimpse inside failed projects so we end up making the same mistakes over and over until someone, somewhere sees enough bits of the jigsaw to start putting them together…There is a lot of failure in the use of social software in business, on the web, in civic society, but we need to see this as a part of the cycle, a step along on the learning curve. (Charman-Anderson, 2008)

Failure then needs to be normalised for digital humanities initiatives, particularly those using Web 2.0 applications; it should be seen as a part of the research process. In this respect, Geert Lovink’s (2008) reflection on the short-lived Discordia group blog revolving around art, media, activism and theory is relevant for the experience of diverCities.[5] The main reason for Discordia‘s failure, according to Lovink, was ‘the lack of coherence within the global new media arts community to have public debates in the World Wide Web, away from the safety of cozy, inward-looking lists. (…) There was not enough of an interest to join an equal, open dialogue between critics, artists, and programmers’ (Lovink, 2008: xxii).

In the case of diverCities, which never even went onto the World Wide Web, it was clearly going to be extremely difficult to mobilise a critical mass of users to participate in the dynamic network of stories created by dense interactivity and active engagement, especially across the different cities. Even the research team itself did not manage to keep up its activity. Indeed, it is possible that a lack of coherence in the interests and outlooks of the international research team might be a main reason for the diverCities‘ failure: even though they did share some intellectual interests as cultural research academics, it seemed clear that they do not form a “community”. However, the very purpose of diverCities as a transnational platform for intercultural dialogue was the establishment of networks of exchange where they did not yet exist. This, after all, is the very rationale of intercultural dialogue: it seeks to create new forms of communication across spatial and cultural divides and between people who generally know or understand little of each other. In other words, it seeks to encourage equal, open dialogue in the absence of a pre-given communal coherence.

Still, the lack of (inter)activity on diverCities does not seem inconsistent with participation patterns on Web 2.0 sites. In this regard, the diverCities experience to date is not so much “failure” but a normal reflection of the levels of participation on most social networking sites that rely on user-generated content. Most participants are content to “lurk”, rather than actively contribute to a site. Only a small percentage of online community members tend to participate/contribute/edit.[6]

So, if the majority of users of Web 2.0 sites are lurkers, then an evaluation of diverCities as a digital humanities project perhaps should also be re-framed around this notion. That is, the diverCities experience is not so much a failure in definitive terms as simply reflective of the norm in online activity. It is interesting to surmise here that the challenges faced by the research team in generating content for the site as a platform for online intercultural dialogue might also be indicative for the broader social practice of intercultural dialogue. That is, a tiny percentage of people will tend to actively participate in the process. The rest will either indirectly engage or remain passive observers. This should put all too optimistic visions of universal participatory democracy into appropriate perspective.

A New Culture of Public Research?

Through the process of conceptualising and constructing the platform, the research team was faced with a number of dilemmas associated with the collaborative and public nature of knowledge production through diverCities. The contribution of stories can be seen as a “free” gift of the writer/contributor to the site – and by implication, to the cause of intercultural dialogue—but is this sustainable? Are there enough (if any) reward structures for participants not only to enter stories, but also to comment on stories put forward by others, which after all, was envisaged as essential to the inter-city intercultural dialogue? Is intercultural dialogue itself a sufficiently attractive practical objective for participants to engage in? The experience of the research team alone is enough to indicate that while enthusiasm for the ideal is great, in practice the objective remains elusive.

It is worth noting that when the dialogue space was properly used by the research team as a site for cross-cultural exchange and dialogue, it worked well and the overall objective of the project was met successfully. An instance of such a positive example of intercultural dialogue taking place on the site was in the “eating” strand and in response to a story on the Makansutra of Singapore. The Makansutra is a Singapore-based food company that does not sell food but promotes the joy of eating, celebrating ‘Asian food culture and lifestyle’ through a variety of media including the publication of food guides, food tours and safaris, and a TV show. The story on diverCities, written by Singaporean team member Daniel Goh, frames the Makansutra as an attempt to represent the multi-racial food culture of Singapore. It shows the mixing and “borrowing” that takes place in Singaporean cuisine, and as such it is a representation of the hybrid reality of everyday life and, thus, it transcends the official attempts at dividing and categorising the Singaporean population along strict racial lines. This story generated a brief online discussion around the notion of food taboos. Mumbai team member Shilpa Phadke reflected on the promiscuity of various Indian cuisines and what it might mean to mix cuisines on a single plate, to defy food puritanism and eat, as many do, Punjabi naan with Gobi Manchurian, a vegetarian nativised version of Indian Chinese cuisine: ‘What does it mean to not respect culinary boundaries – to defy food puritanism by eating things that appear not to belong to each other – that might be seen to ‘belong’ to different categories?’ Chua Beng Huat responded that in Singapore, while cuisines might be mixed on the table (as a part of a single meal) they rarely were on the same plate. Indeed, respect for religious beliefs might be expressed through cuisine as in the case of ethnic Chinese Singaporeans who ‘often accommodate Malay friends by eating Malay food exclusively or “halal foods”. It was then suggested that perhaps food taboos acted as barriers to, rather than agents of, intercultural dialogue if culinary traditions are not compatible.

In this single example, one can see the ingredients for a culture of collaborative public research and a clear representation of intercultural dialogue in process. From a simple exposition about the socio-cultural basis of a Singaporean food company, a discussion on the significance of food as a method of intercultural engagement emerged. Here we get a glimpse of the power of “produsage” (Bruns, 2008): the iterative, collaborative and open-ended creation and extension of information and knowledge as enabled by Web 2.0. The example also shows us the potential productivity of intercultural dialogue itself, the enhanced collective understanding that emerges as people communicate and exchange knowledge and ideas across lines of difference. However, such instances of substantive intercultural dialogue have been rare in the diverCities experiment. Instead, most stories entered by participants have remained without comment. That is, perhaps reflecting the broader culture of humanities scholarship, team members preferred to write their own stories rather than responding to others. They preferred to be individual producers rather than collective “produsers”.

This doesn’t mean that Web 2.0 technologies cannot be an effective platform for facilitating intercultural dialogue. The issue however is not technological, but social and cultural, as well as economic. As Charman-Anderson suggests (2008),

…the biggest speed bump in social software projects is invariably going to be the social, not the software. The technology is improving every month, mainly because it’s being developed by small, nimble vendors who use the software they create and want it to be the very best it can be. But the tech is only a fraction of the battle. The rest…is made of people.

In this regard, Lovink’s insistent, but unanswered questions about the problems of scalability of online networks are worth quoting:

Why is it so difficult for networks to scale up? There seems to be a tendency to split up in a thousand mini-conversations. (…) Can we imagine very large-scale conversations that do not only make sense but also have an impact? Which types of network cultures can become large transformative institutions?’ (Lovink, 2008: 249).

The issues raised throughout this paper, and over the course of the diverCities project, are equally applicable to an evaluation of the online dialogue space as a site for public research and collaborative knowledge production in the digital humanities. One barrier to promoting initiatives such as diverCities as sites for public research is that the prevailing culture of the academy militates against any widespread embrace of “produsage”, ‘where knowledge remains always in the process of development, and where information remains always unfinished, extensible, and evolving’ (Bruns, 2008: 6). In this era of official research assessment exercises, research outcomes need to be presented in the form of bounded publications (e.g.monographs or refereed journals.) In this context, named authorship and ownership of ideas and content are crucial, leaving limited room for academics to engage in exploratory, collaborative, dialogic knowledge production that might count for “nothing”.

One way in which the research team has tried to overcome these problems is by using diverCities in an educational context, where the rewards for content generation are built in as the fulfillment of student tasks. As a teaching tool, the diverCities platform opened up the possibility for students in the participating cities to engage in intercultural dialogue with each other as part of the internationalisation of their university experience. However, this too requires effort and commitment on the part of the teaching academics. Would there still be a need for editorial management and content control? This has elicited two contrasting responses from research team members. In Sydney, an undergraduate class of design students were given the task of generating stories for the site, but only the stories which were considered good enough by the academic lecturer would be uploaded onto the site. Here then the process of selection was upheld rigorously, severely limiting the usage of diverCities as a dialogic Web 2.0 platform. In Singapore, on the other hand, one of the research team members finds the diverCities platform ‘not Web 2.0 enough’. He collected 200+ short ethnographies written by students as part of their introduction to sociology course. However, he found that it was impossible to simply upload these stories to the diverCities platform because many of the stories overlapped with each other, requiring some editorial revision and consolidation. Understandably, the academic does not have the time to do this. Instead, the best thing to have, in his view, would be a Wiki-type platform where students can log on and directly put up their stories and then they can then edit, revise each other’s stories or add to them if they are working on the same topic, as well as engage with stories from co-students in the other cities.

Obviously, this proposal is most in the spirit of Web 2.0 “produsage” and collaborative intercultural dialogue, but it would mean giving up the editorial control that the research team had believed was so necessary to ensure quality and relevance. Does this expose the research team’s incapacity or unwillingness to fully embrace the democratic possibilities of Web 2.0? And to what extent is that incapacity or unwillingness intrinsic to the practice of academic scholarship, which has to date sustained itself through gate-keeping procedures such as peer review? This dilemma illuminates some of the difficulties humanities researchers will encounter in the transition to a far more open-ended, dialogic, and democratic world of digital scholarship.

Conclusion

The ‘failure’ of diverCities was a useful case study in exploring the possibilities and limits of Web 2.0 forms of ‘produsage’ in enhancing scholarly engagement in serious intercultural dialogue. Instead, it emphasises the need for intellectual leadership and pro-active vision to create new knowledge and socially and politically useful forms of intercultural dialogue. Indeed, it suggests that intercultural dialogue itself, as a governmental project, must always struggle against the likelihood of failure because most people do not tend spontaneously to communicate across lines of difference.

Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the ‘contact zone’ (Pratt, 1999: 3) ‘…social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical power relations’ (Pratt, 1999:12), is an apt metaphor to point to the key challenges faced by the research team. Although people can come together in a contact zone, either voluntarily or by force, it does not follow that they will engage with one another. In short, “contact” does not necessarily equal “dialogue”, it may just as well involve conflict, passing association, or sheer indifference. In conceiving diverCities the research team did not create a dialogue space but a contact zone, clarifying some of the paradoxes inherent to the goal of intercultural dialogue. While the idea (l) is for society to engage in intercultural dialogue as a universal form of civic engagement, the reality is that for ongoing exchange and collaboration across lines of difference to take place on a large scale it needs to be orchestrated and engineered. And perhaps academic researchers, with their of necessity (over)developed capacity for scholarly judgement, are much less well-equipped to participate in such intercultural dialogue than they think.

Authors’ Biographies

Ien Ang is Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow and Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney. Her latest book is The SBS Story: The Challenge of Cultural Diversity (UNSW Press, 2008).

Nayantara Pothen has a PhD in History from the University of Sydney and is currently a Research Associate at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney. Her book, provisionally titled Power and Privilege in New Delhi, 1931-50 will be published by Penguin India in 2011.

Notes

[1] An international research team was recruited by Ien Ang, comprising academic researchers from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai (India), the National University of Singapore (Singapore), the University of Western Sydney and the University of Sydney (Australia). The team members were as follows: Professor Ien Ang (overall team leader) (UWS), Professor Kay Anderson (UWS), Dr Peter Dallow (UWS), André Frankovits (UWS), Dr Elaine Lally (UWS), Dr Cameron McAuliffe (UWS), Associate Professor Brett Neilson (UWS), Dr Nayantara Pothen (UWS), Dr Juan Salazar (UWS), Steven Hayes (Usyd), Dr Ian Johnson (Usyd), Andrew Wilson (Usyd), Professor Chua Beng Huat (NUS, Singapore), Dr Daniel Goh (NUS), Dr Eric Thompson (NUS), Professor Anjali Monteiro (TISS, Mumbai), Professor K.P.Jayasankar (TISS), Shilpa Phadke (TISS). See also, http://heuristscholar.org/heurist
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[2] See UNESCO’s website
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[3] See http://acl.arts.usyd.edu.au/threecities
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[4] See http://www.acmi.net.au/digitalstorytelling.aspx
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[5] See Discordia http://www.discordia.us/scoop/special/faq.html
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[6] On Wikipedia, for example, based on the statistics provided on the site itself, active contributors make up only 0.1 per cent of the total number of visitors (See Wikipedia ‘About Us’, accessed 20 August 2008; see also Shirky, 2008: 122-23). In a post dated 27 April 2007 on on Inspire Action, the Mind and Media Eric Primmer suggested that 99.8 per cent of visitors to YouTube and Flickr are lurkers. (See http://inspireaction.mindandmedia.com/2007/04/) Jakob Neilsen cites an overall less stark distribution of participation rates: 90 per cent of users lurk, nine per cent of users contribute a little, and one per cent of an online community accounts for most contributions (Neilsen, 2006); See also Shirky, 2008: 122-23; Marwick, 2006, Charman-Anderson, 2006; Hargittai & Walejko, 2008.
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In some ways discussion of the political implications of Web 2.0 reinvigorates a debate about the democratising nature of the Internet that began in the 1990s. The concept of participation is at the heart of many current debates about politics and technology. There are two main reasons for saying this. On the one hand is an ongoing and increasing concern about public participation, or lack of it, in modern (predominantly Western) democracies. This participatory deficit is to be seen in falling voter turnout at elections, public apathy on key political issues and scorn or indifference for elected political representatives. On the other hand, there is a wave of optimism concerning the potential of new technologies, particularly the web, to enable new forms of participation in economic and public life, to transform political debate and citizenship and to renew the ailing (or perceived to be ailing) institutions of democracy. This optimism around participation and politics, while it has played a role in utopian visions of the internet more or less since its inception, has been reinvigorated recently by the discussion around the so-called Web 2.0. This article argues for a much more critical or sceptical approach to the political promise of Web 2.0. Focusing particularly on Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, it argues that current accounts of the participatory aspects of web culture tend to take a rather narrow view of what such participation might mean. However, aspects of the work of Bernard Stiegler, and that of others in the Ars Industrialis group co-founded by Stiegler, can help inform a more nuanced account of the relationship between politics and participation. It looks specifically at the arguments in Marc Crépon and Bernard Stiegler’s book De la démocratie participative, written during the recent French presidential campaign, and will examine how the idea of participation articulates with key themes in Stiegler’s philosophy of technics. Finally it suggests some ways in which this debate on participation might be moved on.

Web 2.0 and Participation

The read/write web, encompassing weblogs, social bookmarking, wikis and other technologies, is often seen as a key aspect of what is understood by Web 2.0, marking a distinctive shift from earlier, supposedly less participatory, web technologies. Leaving to one side, for the moment, the question of whether the participatory transformations ascribed to Web 2.0 are actually meaningful, there is no question that these technological changes have been accompanied by an increasingly strident optimism on the part of media commentators about their transformative potential. To name just four recent examples from an extremely rich field we have Clay Shirky’s (2008) Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations, Tapscott and Williams’s (2006) Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Charles Leadbeater’s (2008) We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity and Yochai Benkler’s (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. The titles of these book alone testify to the almost-euphoric sense of liberation that their authors ascribe to the participatory and collaborative possibilities offered by these new technologies.

The argument about the democratising aspects of web participation revolves, explicitly or otherwise, around a set of assumptions about the nature of political communication and the functioning of what is often referred to as the ‘public sphere’. The general form of this argument is that the Internet, or in this case Web 2.0, offers a better medium for the creation of a public sphere in which a truly democratic form of political debate can take place. This paper examines critically these claims as they are made in Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, which offers one of the most coherent and rigorous attempts to outline and defend this thesis. What makes Benkler’s book interesting is partly that it puts arguments about the democratising effect of the Internet in the context of long-standing debates in political theory and political communication, most notably Jürgen Habermas’s ideas around the public sphere. But its other strength is the central role that Benkler gives in the creation of a new networked public sphere to the social, peer or ‘nonmarket production’ of content that are often said to characterise Web 2.0 (i.e. ‘User-Generated Content’).

Benkler argues that a new network information economy, characterised by nonmarket modes of participation and production, makes possible a public sphere that better serves the exercise of political freedom necessary in a liberal democracy. While Benkler’s analysis of the emergent network information economy is interesting, his subordination of the changes we are seeing in this economy to normative models of political communication and liberal democracy actually undermines his more radical insights about nonmarket production.

The first part of the The Wealth of Networks argues for the emergence of a new form of information economy, a ‘networked information economy’ which replaces the ‘industrial information economy’ which has been in force since the late-nineteenth century (Benkler, 2006: 3). The primary feature of this networked information economy, for Benkler, is the much greater role within it for ‘decentralised individual action’ (Benkler, 2006: 3). This empowerment of individuals is the result of two key changes in the new ‘network information economy’. The first is a change in the topology of information networks from the hub and spoke model of mass media to a ‘distributed architecture’ with ‘multidirectional connections’ (Benkler, 2006: 212). The second is a dramatic reduction in or, as Benkler has it, the ‘practical elimination of’, communication costs (Benkler, 2006: 212). Together these changes allow a new, more democratic and participative, form of political communication which Benkler calls the ‘networked public sphere’:

The second major implication of the networked information economy is the shift it enables from the mass-mediated public sphere to a networked public sphere. This shift is also based on the increasing freedom individuals enjoy to participate in creating information and knowledge, and the possibilities it presents for a new public sphere to emerge alongside the commercial, mass-media markets. (Benkler, 2006: 10)

One important feature of Benkler’s analysis of the ‘networked public sphere’ is his claim that it is inherently more democratic than the ‘mass-mediated public sphere’. Benkler believes his argument to be much more restricted than previous democratisation theses about the Internet. As he puts it, ‘any consideration of the democratising effects of the Internet must measure its effects as compared to the commercial, mass-media-based public sphere, not as compared to an idealized utopia that we embraced a decade ago of how the Internet might be’ (Benkler, 2006: 10). The great strength of Benkler’s argument here is the understanding, derived from Habermas, that participation, in and of itself, is not the key criteria by which to assess the democratic promise of the web. The superiority of the network public sphere over the mass-mediated public sphere cannot be based simply on the ability of the web to give everyone a voice. As Benkler is well aware, such an idea would fall foul of the Babel objection: that is, that if ‘everyone can speak at once, no one can be heard’ (Benkler, 2006: 10). If the network is to function as a public sphere, in the Habermas sense, even the watered-down version of Habermas that Benkler is propagating, it must do more than this. Benkler therefore outlines a set of criteria, derived from Habermas, by which to judge the efficacy of the new networked public sphere. It must, according to Benkler show itself capable of at least five things: Firstly, ‘Universal Intake’, in that it must be open to everyone. Secondly, it must show itself capable of filtering relevant information that is ‘plausibly within the domain of organised political action’ (Benkler, 2006: 183). Thirdly, it must have systems for accrediting information sources that are likely to be reliable. Fourthly, it must be capable of synthesising public opinion, bringing together disparate individual opinions into a coherent public opinion. Fifthly, it must be independent from government control.

Naturally Benkler goes on to argue that in fact the networked public sphere does satisfy these criteria. This assertion is based largely on research into the link structure of web pages, or the topology of the network. What emerges from this research is that, according to Benkler, far from being a massive collection of disparate information and opinion, the web in fact presents a relatively organised network topology. Benkler cites research showing ‘that the number of links that must be traversed from any point in the network to any other point is relatively small’ (Benkler, 2006: 252). This is because creators of web pages tend to link to other material relevant to their concerns. In this way, clusters or groups of pages emerge. Bloggers link to stories in other blogs that they find to be topical. Therefore a kind of order emerges from the chaos: pages that are particularly topical or relevant find themselves being heavily linked to and their ideas become more widely propagated. Benkler sees these link structures or network topologies as evidence of the filtering and salience necessary within a healthy public sphere. Benkler’s conclusion, backed by the research he cites in relation to network topologies and a series of case studies, is that the network, in particular, the blogosphere, does indeed provide a better form of public sphere than mass media. As Benkler puts it, the network information economy has, ‘fundamentally altered the capacity of individuals, acting alone or with others, to be active participants in the public sphere as opposed to its passive readers, listeners or viewers’ (Benkler, 2006: 212).

Now there are a number of problems with Benkler’s argument here concerning the networked public sphere. The first set of problems is with the way he uses Habermas. For Benkler’s aim is quite explicitly to incorporate the idea of the public sphere within liberal political theory. Habermas’s ideas tend to be associated, as Mark Warren points out, with a more radical model of democracy (Warren, 1995: 167-8). In particular Habermas’s discursive model implies understanding individual autonomy in terms of social relations which is in most ways, as Benkler himself admits, quite alien to liberal political theory (Benkler, 2006: 278-9; Warren, 1995: 172-3). Where Benkler seems to think that Habermas’s ideas can be blended with liberal theory one might well wonder if the two aren’t in fact completely heterogeneous. Benkler’s ideas of the public sphere, while drawing heavily on Habermas in many respects, curiously ignore one or two important aspects of his account. This becomes particularly evident in the case studies that are used in the The Wealth of Networks to demonstrate the operation of the network public sphere. The first one concerns a plan by the Sinclair Broadcasting Group to air, a week and a half before the 2004 US presidential elections, a documentary critical of the Democratic candidate John Kerry’s Vietnam war record. Benkler’s account shows how an online campaign, largely organised around the BoycottSBG.com website, targeting advertisers and local network affiliates, succeeded in undermining Sinclair’s stock price and eventually forcing the network to change its programming. Benkler seems to see this case study as both an example of the power of the mass-mediated public sphere (the assumed influence that Sinclair’s programme would have had) and of the ability of the network public sphere to counter it. However, this is in fact a highly ambiguous example of the networked public sphere. The Sinclair example demonstrates the use of the web not particularly as a medium for the rational debate of political policy, but rather as a tool for the organisation of collective political action. Whilst this is interesting and commendable, Habermas’s conception of the public sphere explicitly excludes it as a forum for collective action. The public sphere is a forum for debate, not for political action. As Mark Warren puts it, ‘Habermas emphasises that public spheres cannot be organisers of collective action…In any collective action, it is virtually impossible to have symmetrical relations of power, even if relations are fluid and voice is formally equal’ (Warren, 1995: 171-2). It’s very important for Habermas that this sphere for rational debate is kept separate from the political apparatus. The importance of this distinction to Habermas—and Benkler’s indifference to it—is telling. At the very least it shows that while he thinks he claims to be operating with a very ‘limited definition’ of the public sphere he actually designates by this term in practice something much broader than Habermas. Now this is not just nitpicking with Benkler’s use of Habermas but goes to the heart of his analysis: is ‘public sphere’ the right concept to describe the phenomena that Benkler is observing? Why not describe them instead, for example, as new forms of sociality or collectivity? The answer is that in Benkler’s analysis new forms of sociality and collectivity, for example, the social production of content, are always subordinated to a basically liberal model, the capability of the new network information economy to promote ‘decentralised individual action’.

My point here is not, implicitly or otherwise, to argue for the supremacy of debate to political action of vice versa. Nor am I arguing for the absolute authority of Habermas’s model of political communication. The point is simply that, in as much as he misses the significance of this distinction in Habermas, Benkler skews the terms of the debate about the public sphere. By choosing, like many others, to make Habermas’s ideas around the public sphere the reference point for his discussion of web participation, Benkler is asking to be judged by the standards of that model. To satisfy those standards Benkler really needs to find examples where online discussion is defining the terms of political debate, independently from state and other political apparatus, not merely being used a tool to organise political action in response to a debate that has already been constituted elsewhere.

But there is actually a wider point here. It’s not at all clear that ‘democracy’, ‘citizenship’, ‘participation’ and so on are the most relevant political concepts to describe the kind of changes that we are seeing in relation to Web 2.0 and within what Benkler calls the ‘network information economy’. Other concepts that might be just as useful would be ‘labour’, ‘property’ and ‘collectivity’. New forms of social labour are of course important to Benkler’s case, but they are important for what they make possible, which is the better exercise of individual political freedom. Part of the reason for this can be seen from within The Wealth of Networks itself.

Nonmarket Production

One of the most interesting sections of Benkler’s book is the chapter entitled ‘The Economics of Social Production’. The principal topic of this chapter is the concept of ‘nonmarket’ production, the fact that people who contribute to Wikipedia, social bookmarking sites or even the blogosphere are collectively constructing works of clear economic value but are, for the most part, not participating in an economic market as such. For Benkler this raises three questions:

First, why do people participate? What is their motivation when they work for…a project for which they are not paid or directly rewarded? Second, why now, why here? What, if anything, is special about the digitally networked environment…Third, is it efficient to have all these people sharing their computers and donating their time and creative effort? (Benkler, 2006: 91)

These are all, of course, good questions to ask but it’s quite telling that Benkler doesn’t ask another question: is all this free labour being exploited? This is, on the other hand, obviously a question asked by others, for example Tiziana Terranova in Network Culture:

Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labour on the Net includes the activity of building web sites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists and building virtual spaces (Terranova, 2004: 74).

Terranova rejects, or seeks to move on from, the answers that Benkler finds to the questions he raises about nonmarket production (which are, basically, gift economies and transaction-costs theory.)[1] Terranova, drawing on the Italian autonomist tradition, prefers a much more nuanced account of free labour, one that sees it as symptomatic of transformations within capital and labour themselves. The transformations within labour are not simply a product of the networked information economy, or the technical affordances of the internet as a distributed system, but are part of wider shifts in the nature of labour in postindustrial societies:

The Internet does not automatically turn every user into an active producer, and every worker into a creative subject. The process whereby production and consumption are reconfigured within the category of free labour signals the unfolding of another logic of value, whose operations need careful analysis (Terranova, 2004: 75).

In fact there are two essential points that we can take from Terranova’s argument here. The first is that we ought to be suspicious of the generalisation that the network, or as Benkler has it, the ‘network information economy’, is turning the ‘passive’ consumers of mass media into ‘active’ producers of the network public sphere. There is in fact a long and distinguished tradition in media studies which critiques the idea that audiences are simply ‘passive’ in their relation with mass media.[2] Consideration of this tradition might help to undermine the simple association between activity/passivity and production/consumption. The second point that Terranova is right to assert is that understanding the kind of changes implicit in the social production of internet content can’t be simply a matter of understanding changes in network technology, but must always be understood in relation to wider social and economic changes. The significance of this point is underlined by existing perspectives on technological change offered by Science Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory, which tend to argue that, as Andrew Feenberg puts it, ‘technology is a social phenomenon through and through’ (Feenberg, 2003: 74). Although Benkler’s approach is undoubtedly more subtle than many net theorists, and despite his own rebuttal of the charge of technological determinism (Benkler, 2006: 369-72), he continues to regard the transformations he describes, such as social production or free labour, as fundamentally phenomena of network communications, rather than as examples of wider social change.

Moreover, although repeatedly making the claim about the centrality of participation to democratic life, Benkler doesn’t really attempt to engage with the history of the concept of participation in democratic theory. Although in many ways more rigorous than other attempts, fundamentally Benkler’s thesis is fairly commonplace: there’s a problem with the functioning of democracy in modern Western democracies, this problem is largely due to the limited kind of political debate that takes place in mass media, and the web can solve this by enabling greater participation. But what does participation really mean here?

Benkler’s response to this question is shaped in no small part by his desire to reconcile his arguments with liberal political theory. As Benkler is clearly aware there is a conflict between on the one hand, arguing, as he does, that culture and the way it is produced is important to the operation of democracy and the argument that democracy is essentially the expression of individual freedom. As soon as you question the autonomy or preexistence of individuals in relation to culture, you are already at odds with liberal political theory. Benkler tries to reconcile that as follows:

I claim that the modalities of cultural production and exchange are a proper subject for normative evaluation within a broad range of liberal political theory…Liberal political theory needs a theory of culture and agency that is viscous enough to matter normatively, but loose enough to give its core foci — the individual and the political system — room to be effective independently, not as a mere expression or extension of culture (276-7).

As the above makes clear, the relationship between culture and democracy here is essentially narrow. In fact for Benkler the benefit of the networked public sphere — and the participation that it implies — is that it renders culture more ‘transparent’ thereby minimising the effect of culture on individual agency or autonomy. The kind of participation that Benkler describes is limited to avoiding ‘culture’ getting in the way of liberal democracy, rather than any inherent change in the nature of democracy itself. Paradoxically, then, despite the fact that his argument is entirely concerned with participatory culture and its benefits for democracy, Benkler is not very interested in wider questions of participation and democracy, above all not ones that would question the liberal model.

In fact, surprisingly given its subject matter, Benkler’s approach raises two fundamental questions, without addressing them at any great length. First, what is the relationship between technological change and social and political change? Secondly, what role does participation play in democracy? To comprehend the kinds of changes Benkler is concerned with we really need to address and challenge in a more radical fashion the relationship between technology, culture and democracy.

Participation, Technics and Individuation

It’s really the question about participation and new technology that is addressed in Marc Crépon and Bernard Stiegler’s De la démocratie participative (On Participatory Democracy) (Crépon and Stiegler, 2007). The essays which comprise this volume were written during the French presidential election and respond particularly to the campaign of Ségolène Royal, which consistently evoked the idea of participatory democracy, as evidenced by the website Desirs d’avenir (Desires for the future) which solicited contributions from the public in the building of her manifesto. Royal’s commitment to participatory democracy, apparently inspired in part by the work of Rancière, is treated with some disdain by Crépon and Stiegler.

In his essay, ‘La démocratie en défaut’ (‘Democracy in default’), Crépon argues that this call for participatory democracy must be analysed in terms of the coincidence of two phenomena: the first is a crisis in representative democracy, characterised by declining voter turnouts, disaffection with the political class and so on; the other is the rise of the new technological possibilities of the web. For Crépon this crisis in representative democracy is itself twofold, divided between what he calls the ‘attachment’, i.e., the attachment to hard-won democratic institutions, and the ‘desire’, i.e., the desire for democracy as a kind of open possibility. This desire is explained by Crépon with reference to Derrida’s concept of a democracy that is always ‘to come’, which makes this desire also, constitutively, a kind of default or lack défaut. As Crépon puts it, this default ‘maintains confidence in the possibilities of untold and unprecedented social, moral and political relations that democracy could or should still harbour’ (Crépon and Stiegler, 2007: 27-28). For Crépon participatory democracy can only be meaningful if it gives a chance to both the attachment (to existing democratic institutions) and the desire for democracy as an open possibility, democracy to come etc.). Without addressing both these poles of the democratic crisis, participatory democracy might be even worse than the crisis it seeks to redress. Crépon says, ‘the risk then would be that, in the call for participatory democracy, the mirror of a direct participation, free from all mediation, a trap (miroir aux alouettes), finishes by effacing democracy itself’.[3] In other words, the risk would be that such a participatory democracy would descend into a kind of interactive televised populism.

Both Crépon and Stiegler see as dangerous the vision of web participation in which it opens a ‘closed’ political establishment to a new exteriority of public. The paradigmatic examples of this would be the televised interactive debates of the Royal campaign. Such participation makes great play of opening up debate to a class of people who are not political insiders, of allowing anyone to speak regardless of knowledge or expertise. But this utopian vision displays a kind of naivety about the nature of political discourse. As Crépon puts it, ‘The words that everyone uses to voice their opinion are rarely theirs. They are tributaries of sources of information that are, for the majority of citizen-televison viwers, televisual information’ (Crépon and Stiegler, 2007: 54). How meaningful is such participation when its terms and vocabulary are decided elsewhere? Indeed what can appear to happen in such debates is a kind of staged engagement with the outside, one which simply mirrors the political establishment. If the aim is to get outside a manipulated media discourse, what one finds at that ‘outside’ is merely a reflection of the inside, using the same language but with the authority of the ordinary and the popular. The problem, on the one hand, is that it can seem that apparently profound shifts in communication really represent nothing more than extension of the existing tools of political marketing or, ‘…a way to channel, identify, catalyse and performatively transform political tendencies…because what is targeted and solicited here is less an opinion than an audience’ (Crêpon and Stiegler, 2007: 106). The danger, on the other hand, is that these forms of debate simply offer a way for the political to appear more legitimate, appear more open and accountable, while all the time de-legitimising and short circuiting the proper apparatus of representative democracy.

In order to explore what true participatory democracy might mean, Crépon invokes C.B. Macpherson’s four models of democracy (which are also presented to some extent in Macpherson as four stages of democracy). These models are protective democracy, developmental democracy, equilibrium democracy and participatory democracy. The protective democracy model, which Macpherson associates with Bentham and James Mill, serves primarily to protect the self-interest of citizens from bad government. In this model, Macpherson argues, ‘there is no enthusiasm for democracy, no idea that it could be a morally transformative force; it is nothing but a logical requirement for the governance of inherently self-interested conflicting individuals’ (Macpherson, 1977: 43). Developmental democracy on the other hand, which Macpherson ascribes to John Stuart Mill, Dewey and others contained within it, ‘a moral vision of possibility of the improvement of mankind, and of a free and equal society not yet achieved’ (Macpherson, 1977: 43). Equilibrium democracy, the system which comes to prevail in the twentieth century, abandons this moral vision and is to a large extent for Macpherson a return to the values of protective democracy: democracy reconciles the competing and diverse interests of citizens through the party system where voters as consumers choose from policies like products offered by the various parties. The equilibrium model entails no sense of individual or social improvement but simply a reconciliation of competing interests through the market system of elections.

For Crépon, Macpherson’s models of democracy are useful because they help to diagnose the democratic crisis. Equilibrium democracy situates the citizen as a consumer of political products of which they have no control of the supply, as Crépon puts it:

In making the citizen-electors hypothetical consumers of political products over which they have no mastery of the supply (and of which it must be analysed by what channels and which technologies they are imposed on them), the equilibrium democracy model only transposes the symbolic and spiritual misery of the market onto the political domain.[4]

Here we can see the difference between Benkler and Crépon in sharp relief. For Benkler the kind of participation empowered by the web is not a move away from what is described here as equilibrium democracy. Indeed, far from it: the best that can be said of Benkler’s ‘network public sphere’ is that it fixes the equilibrium model by empowering consumers and therefore enabling a ‘freer’ market in the consumption of political products. For Benkler there is nothing wrong with the political system per se, there is just a problem with political communication that can be fixed by enabling a more transparent form of communication, one ‘freed’ from the distortions of mass media. For Crépon, on the other hand, it is because culture is right at the heart of democracy that its industrialisation in the form of mass media poses such a problem.

In this description we can also see Crépon moving the debate into distinctively Stieglerian terrain with the concept of ‘symbolic misery’ (as outlined by Stiegler in the two volumes of De La misère symbolique (Stiegler, 2004a, Stiegler, 2005). Stiegler defines symbolic misery as ‘a loss of individuation which results from a loss of participation in the production of symbols’.[5] The loss of participation here is fundamental to the production of culture in the equilibrium model. It cannot be corrected simply by the appearance of a communication medium that harnesses ‘decentralized individual action’. In the first place this is because Crépon and Stiegler have a very different understanding of the relationship between culture and individual or group identity than Benkler’s narrow liberal model allows. This model can be seen in the reworking of the relationship between ‘technics’ and ‘individuation’.

The concept of individuation, which is central to Stiegler’s work, is itself derived from the concept of psychic and collective individuation in the work of Gilbert Simondon. For Simondon the production of the ‘I’, the individual and that of the collective ‘we’, the group are inseparable.(Crépon and Stiegler, 2007: 68n1). Collective individuation is to be understood as a process of transformation within a preindividual milieu and not as the coming together of a set of preexisting individuals. The loss of individuation which forms part of the condition Stiegler calls symbolic misery relates to the theorisation of technics which Stiegler talks about in his early work. For Stiegler philosophy is both founded on and founders on what he calls ‘technics’. What he means by technics is not to be confused with technology in the modern sense. Technics encompasses everything from primitive tools through systems of writing to modern telecommunications. Stiegler even thinks under the terms technics something like language, for example. For him, ‘technics is the condition of culture’ and it would be ‘absurd to oppose technics to culture’ (Stiegler, 2004b: 59). Technics in this sense is therefore inseparable from culture and society and it makes no sense either to talk of technics determining culture and society or vice versa. Culture and society are not constituted by technics as if by cause but rather constituted through it. Nor does technics in Stiegler’s sense represent scientific progress or a deterministic evolution; rather, however strange this may seem, technics a kind of pure accidentality or contingency. Indeed for Stiegler it is because of the exteriorisation of the human into technics, artefacts or inorganic organized matter that culture and society constitute themselves contingently.

Mortals, having no qualities except by default, prosthetically, are on the contrary, animals condemned to seek ceaselessly their quality, that is, their destiny, that is, their time [...] Humans are only by default. That means, they are only in as much as they become[6]

Technics thus understood is not merely instrumental, a means to an end, where the ‘end’ remains a resolutely human need or desire. Rather technics shapes what it means to be human in the first place and the ‘human’ in this sense is constituted always already through technics. Indeed it is the prosthesis of the human: the human is constituted not by some interior capacity (e.g. consciousness) but by a new prosthetic relationship with matter. If there is a crisis caused by technics in the form of modern technology it is not because something ‘natural’ or human is supplanted by something technological. Rather it is because there has been a transformation in the essential technicity that belongs to the human. To be more specific there has been a transformation in a specific form of technics that Stiegler calls ‘mnemotechnics’ or tertiary memory. All forms of technics support a type of cultural, non-genetic or ‘epiphylogenetic’, memory, but there is a subset that ‘one must call mnemotechnics, to speak properly’,[7] a type of technics that is specifically ‘made for keeping memory’.[8]

One obvious example of mnemotechnics is writing and indeed Stiegler dedicates a large part of the second volume of La technique et le temps, ‘La Désorientation’, to a discussion of the transformation in mnemotechnics represented by the shift to orthographic writing.[9] However, it is in a new transformation in the course of mnemotechnics, one represented by the audiovisual tele-technologies of mass media, that lies the cultural crisis of which Stiegler writes. In part this is because these new forms of audio-visual recording introduce a new class of industrial temporal object. Simondon argues that the rise of the machine tool removes the ability of the skilled worker to differentiate their labor from that of other workers: ‘a loss of individuation’ which Stiegler sees reproduced at the level of consciousness by the new teletechnologies and their industrialization of memory. The rise of these new ‘orthothetic’ analogue and digital recording technologies marks a break with the recording technology of orthographic writing.[10] Moreover, the new industrial temporal objects of analogue and digital recording represent a new relationship between singularity, consciousness and time:

The society of industrial temporal objects thus transforms our existences into a prefabricated series of clichés that we string together without perceiving very much. The coincidence of the time of the industrial temporal objects’ flow with our consciousnesses has the consequence that, in making them our objects of consciousness, that is, of attention, we embrace and adopt their time: we adhere to them in such great intimacy that they come to substitute themselves for the proper temporalities of our consciousnesses. Such is the catastrophic utilization, by cultural industries, of the power of temporal objects, which results in a ecological catastrophe in the milieu of spirit that is epiphylogenesis.[11]

However sceptical one might be to ascribing passivity to the mass media audience, it would seem that the industrial model of mass media does situate the audience as consumers, passive or active, of media products. To that extent mass media implies an asymmetric relationship between producers and consumers. As Stiegler argues in De la démocratie participative, whereas language is an associative symbolic milieu, in that everybody who understands a language is intrinsically a speaker of that language, mass media represent a dissociative milieu in that they oppose producers to consumers (being able to consume television doesn’t imply being able to make it) (Crépon and Stiegler, 2007: 75-79). It’s obvious to both Benkler and Stiegler that in some sense the new types of collaborative cultural production associated with Web 2.0 represent a potential challenge to the industrial and asymmetric model of cultural production. However, Stiegler argues web participation will only be meaningful politically if it brings about a new type of associative milieu (and argues for government intervention to promote these types of usage of the web). For Benkler, the main benefit of the network is improved possibilities for communication between already-constituted individuals, leading to enhanced possibilities for ‘decentralised individual action’. For Crépon and Stiegler, the network’s potential will only be realised in new forms of individual and collective individuation, that is, new ways in which individuals and groups are constituted, new forms of sociality. This leads them to be much more cautious about participation as the achievement or destination of Web 2.0.

The issue of participation is the pivot between those who understand the web in the context of wider social and cultural transformations and those who see it primarily as a communication medium. In Benkler the problem of participation is construed negatively: the network is ‘freer’ than previous forms of media and this removal of the barriers of corporate ownership and control allows an organic decentralisation and empowerment of individuals to occur. However, for Stiegler participation to be meaningful must also represent a much more positive social and economic empowerment. More widely, a true participation must mean more than simply new technologies of participation, it is a politico-economic project, not simply a technological one (Crépon and Stiegler, 2007: 85). In a sense this echoes the argument we have seen Terranova make earlier. Benkler (and others) are far too ready to see web participation or nonmarket production as simply consequences of network communications. However, participation, like free labour, must be understood in the context of wider social and economic changes and not simply as a network phenomenon.

Author’s Biography

Ben Roberts is a lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Bradford.

Notes

[1] On transactions-costs theory, see Tapscott and Williams, 2006: 55-57; Benkler, 2006: 106-116.
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[2] On the history and development of this tradition, see for example Moores, 1993.
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[3] ‘Le risque alors serait que, dans l’appel d’une démocratie participative, le miroir d’une participation directe, affranchie de toute médiation, miroir aux alouettes, ne finisse par effacer la démocratie elle-même.’ (Crépon and Stiegler, 2007: 29).
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[4] En faisant des citoyens-électeurs d’hypothétiques consommatuers de produits politiques dont, en réalité, ils ne maitrîsent pas l’offre (et dont il faut analyser par quels canaux, avec quelles technologies il leur sont imposés), le modèle de la démocratie d’équilibre ne fait que transposer la misère symbolique et spirituelle que produit le marché sur le plan politique.’ (Crépon and Stiegler, 2007: 42).
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[5] ‘Par misère symbolique, j’entends donc la perte d’individuation qui résulte de la perte de participation à la production des symboles’ (Stiegler, 2004a: 33).
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[6] ‘Les mortels, n’ayant pas de qualités sinon par défaut, prothétiquement, sont, au contraire, des animaux condamnés à rechercher sans cesse leur qualité, c’est-à-dire leur destin, c’est-à-dire leur temps. Cette temporalité se fonde dans ce fait que, à l’origine, dans ce fait que, à cet égard, les mortels n’ont pas d’origine. Les hommes ne sont en quelque sorte que par défaut. C’est-à-dire qu’ils ne sont qu’en tant qu’ils deviennent.’ (Stiegler, 2004b: 43).
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[7] ‘Il faut soigneusement distinguer la technique comme milieu de la mémoire épiphylogenetique en général, et ce que l’on doit appeler les mnémotechniques à proprement parler’ (Stiegler, 2004b: 59).
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[8] ‘faite pour émoire’ (Stiegler, 2004b: 60).
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[9] See Stiegler, 1996: 67-73.
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[10] ‘Orthothetic’ is Stiegler’s neologism of which Stiegler comments: ‘I have had to construct this neologism on the basis of the Greek words orthotès thésis. The orthotès , and the thésis [position]. The utterances that I call ‘orthothetic’ (as is the case with alphabetic utterances) set down [posent] the past exactly.’ (‘J’ai dû construire ce néologisme à partir des mots grec orthotèsthésis. L’orthotès ‘exactitude, et la thésis . Les énoncés que je dis «orthothétiques» (c’est le cas des énoncés alphabétiques) posent exactement le passé’ (Stiegler, 2004b: 64-5).
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[11] ‘La société des objets temporels industriels transforme ainsi nos existences en séries préfabriquées de clichés que l’on enchaîne sans trop s’en apercevoir. La coÏncidence du temps de l’écoulement des objets temporels industriels avec le temps de nos consciences a pour conséquence que, en faisant nos objets de conscience, c’est-à-dire d’attention, nous en épousons et en adoptons le temps : nous y adhérons en si grande intimité qu’ils viennent se substituer aux temporalités propres de nos consciences. Telle est l’utilisation catastrophiques, par les industries culturelles, de la vertu des objets temporels : il en résulte une catastrophe écologique dans ce milieu de l’esprit qu’est l’épiphylogenèse’ (Stiegler, 2004b: 85-6).
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References

Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979; 1947).

Benkler, Yochai. ‘From Consumers to Users: Shifting the Deeper Structures of Regulation Toward Sustainable Commons and User Access’, Federal Communications Law Journal 52 (2000): 561-580.

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 2006).

Crépon, Marc and Bernard Stiegler. De la démocratie participative (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2007).

Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982; 1972).

Feenberg, Andrew. ‘Modernity Theory and Technology Studies’ in Modernity and Technology, eds. Andrew Feenberg, Thomas J Misa, and Philip Brey (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 73-104.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederik Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989; 1962).

Macpherson, C.B. The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

Moores, Shaun. Interpreting Audiences: the Ethnography of Media Consumption (London: Sage, 1993).

Morley, David. Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992).

Roberts, Ben. ‘Cinema as mnemotechnics: Bernard Stiegler and the industrialisation of memory’, Angelaki 11 (2006): 55-63.

Rossiter, Ned. Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (Rotterdam: NAi, 2006).

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (London: Penguin, 2008).

Stiegler, Bernard. La technique et le temps. Volume 2. La désorientation (Paris: Galilée, 1996).

Stiegler, Bernard. De la misère symbolique. Volume 1. L’époque hyperindustrielle (Paris: Galilée, 2004).

Stiegler, Bernard. Philosopher par accident: Entretiens avec élie During (Paris: Galilée, 2004).

Stiegler, Bernard. De la misère symbolique. Volume 2. La catastrophè du sensible (Paris: Galilée, 2005).

Tapscott, Don and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New York: Penguin, 2006).

Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004).

Warren, Mark E. ‘The self in discursive democracy’ in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K White (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Early on with the first Apples, we had these dreams that the computer would let you know what you wanted to do.

– Steve Wozniak

Digital and Medial

Wozniak’s nightmare endures; still we dream of the computer that already knows what one wants. If only we could eliminate the clumsy interface, all that clicking and typing, the computer would at last become equal to the will of the user. Fully adequate to Marshall McLuhan’s description of technology as an ‘extension of ourselves’, a transparent interface would bypass the senses to transcend medium altogether.

Problematic at best, the desire for a transparent interface nevertheless drives much of digital culture and technology. But not the Web; or at least, not Web 1.0. Thoroughly commercialized, comfortably parsed into genres, serving billions of pages of predigested content to passive consumers, the World Wide Web as developed in the ’90s unabashedly embraces its role as medium. While so many digital technologies work to hide their mediacy–drawing in the user with a total simulated sensorium, dematerializing the resistances of size and weight, untangling the knots of cables tying user to machine and machine to cubicle, minimizing the interface–Web 1.0 proudly clings to the browser as a glaring reminder of its medial character.

While Web 2.0 has not forsaken the browser altogether, it nevertheless seems to offer a different sort of mediation. Arising alongside the atomization of browser functions, the ubiquitization of connectivity, and the coincidence of producer and user, Web 2.0 retains the form of a medium while reaching for the experiential logic of immediacy. This is not the immediacy of the transparent interface; rather, Web 2.0 effects an immediate relationship between the individual and culture. The interface does not disappear, but its mediacy is subsumed under the general form of cultural participation. Focusing on the “version upgrade” from Web 1.0 to 2.0, this essay will explore the implications for mediacy of this transition, noting that the fantasy of immediacy which drives Web 2.0 is layered and complex. The typical account of immediacy proposes to eliminate the interface and so construct a virtual reality (VR). But Web 2.0 mostly sidesteps the virtual, propelled instead by a fantasy of intuition in which the Web already knows what you want because it is you. Crucially, fantasies about the digital are effective: the computer’s futurity inhabits our world, finding its expression in politics, advertising, budgeting, strategic planning, fiction, philosophy, and in the hopes and fears that infuse and define our culture. Conceptions of today’s future are inevitably shaped by the digital, which appears in forward-looking images and texts from patent applications to novels and film. A fantastic promise, often utopian, drives the development and adoption of digital technologies. But we do not fantasize without an attendant anxiety, a worry about what becomes of us in the digital future.

No one is sure whether Web 2.0 has arrived. When it carried the aura of futurity its fanfare was brash, but like much technological evolution, its actual adoption has been more subtle. Sighting along the line that connects Web 1.0 to 2.0 and 3.0, we can discern a telling fantasy about the internet and the place it makes for the user. Whereas the loudest discourse about the digital continues to trumpet VR as the ne plus ultra of the digital future, the fantasy surrounding the internet looks down a different path of digital progress. Instead of imagining a predefined virtual world in which a consumer can explore and play without risk, we anticipate a world made by the user’s desire, a domain equal to the will of the user. This is the fantasy of intuition, the computer that knows what one wants, supplanting the tired fantasy of virtuality. These two fantasies are easily confused and frequently intertwined, for they both answer to a more general desire for immediacy, the desire to erase the gap that separates user and computer. Immediacy includes both virtuality and intuition, but the discourse of VR tends to eclipse the more subtle (and less representational) issue of the intuitive interface.

In Remediation, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin note that new media move in two different directions, toward a hypermediacy that underlines the medial nature of new media, and toward a countervailing immediacy that works to erode new media’s mediacy. Bolter and Grusin claim that a dialectic of hypermediacy and immediacy characterizes all media to some extent, though new media realize this bipolarity with particular intensity. Media are traditionally understood according to a tripartite, unidirectional schema: sender → channel → receiver, or author → content → audience. This structure is fundamental to media but inadequate, and the interactivity of new media mounts an especially fierce challenge to this traditional image. Interactivity ties together the ends of the simple schema, coinciding audience and author; ‘for the individual participant, the traditional value chain of producer-distributor-consumer has condensed to a singular point’ (Bruns, 2008). There are no longer distinct actors separated by a transmission channel; without opposed boundaries, the channel, the middle does not hold. Below I argue that this scrambling of the medial position engenders a risk, a dissolution of the subject, when the audience can no longer be separated from the content with which it interacts. Exciting and powerful, interactivity is thus also dangerous, for it threatens to dissolve actors and medium, an information soup.

When the digital collapses the two ends of the medial schema, it also renders indistinct the middle term, the medium, by denying its specificity. Television and books, though each includes many genres, impart a character to their contents. No matter what is on television, it is televisual, and if this character is hard to define it is nevertheless distinctive and recognizable. The digital by contrast resists essential character, for it excels at a broad range of simulation; it can behave as almost any medium, a ‘universal media machine’ (Manovich, 2001: 69). In light of its apparent lack of medium specificity, some commentators propose to label the digital a panmedium, but this goes too far.[1] While the digital can effectively simulate a great many things (TV, newspaper, books, film, radio, compact disc, telephone, etc.), it never submits entirely to the simulated, stamping its products and processes with its own ontology. Recognizing the need for some additional complexity, Alan Kay coins the term metamedium to describe the medial character of the computer. ‘The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited. It is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools’ (1999: 136). According to Kay, the metamedium is a construction kit, a medium for the invention of media as much as for their capture. This awards the computer a creative (and not only mimetic) role, to exercise ‘degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered’. The computer is not just a simulation machine, but a vastly malleable canvas.

Emphasizing the computer’s ‘protean nature’, Kay does not mean that the computer is a nascent technology. Rather, he maintains that the digital is essentially and eternally protean, its nature always to be determined. Which technology insists more forcefully on its own futurity? The high-tech industry sells a promise with every product, a promise about what the digital will do tomorrow. With a dynamic of constant renewal (hence also built-in obsolescence), the digital is the technology of the future. This is the age of the imminent arrival of the next big thing: the next version number, the next chip, the next OS, the next standard. The ontology of the computer includes an indeterminacy that might be turned to whatever purpose, protean despite the determinism of the binary code.

For example, consider the introduction of new operating systems. When Microsoft or Apple introduces a new operating system or a new version of an operating system, many of its features are trumpeted on the basis of what it will eventually be capable of when certain future conditions are met. A 64-bit OS will really work well once applications are recompiled to take advantage of this wide-bus architecture; new hardware standards will shine as soon as third-party manufacturers re-engineer their products to operate according to the new integrated standard. Advances in hardware and software are often predicated on the imminent arrival of complementary advances, and the typical situation is one of constant flux, where standards are altered before they have been entirely implemented. The very concept of a standard has a different meaning in the digital realm: digital standards tend to serve both as norms governing current behavior to ensure interoperability or broad consistency and predictability, but also as virtual carrots, dangling forever in front of the industry to prompt its progress.

The Web as Medium

If the fundamental proteanism of the digital perplexes its ready categorization as a simple medium, the World Wide Web offers a complex counterpoint to the computer’s recalcitrance. For no digital technology more than the Web can claim to be a (new) medium. We obtain news and information on the Web. We watch video and listen to music. We publish and distribute fiction and analysis on the Web. We shop, make art, and pass the time on the Web. Understood in terms of these and its many other functions, the Web is a medium.

The Web’s claim to mediacy is not generated spontaneously. Driven by a confluence of commercial and popular interests the Web sloughs off the dynamic open-endedness of the digital and tends increasingly toward the staid and static. We visit the same sites each day, settle into familiar and comfortable habits of browsing. But it was not always so. Twelve years ago you did not browse but surfed the Web. Surfing is active, thrilling and risky. The waves carry you where they will, and the water may even overwhelm you. The experience of surfing the Web used to be an unpredictable and exciting one; the next link led who-knows-where. Following the currents whose dynamic topology was inscribed in the hyperlinks leading from page to page, the user generated not just a new path, a new text, but a whole new set of meanings, a new activity. (Jerome McGann refers to those early days of the Web as the ‘World Wild West’ [2001: 5].) In the mid-’90s, surfing the Web was surrounded by an aura of excitement and invention, and there was a shared sense that the mass-scale availability of hyperlinked documents and hypermedia formats was producing a new way of reading, previously unknown. No one knew quite what direction this challenging network might go, and its instability and unpredictability resisted the ascription medium. (In the early ’90s, the frenzy of academic research into hypertext was driven by the belief that we were teetering on the cusp of a whole new paradigm of textuality. Somewhat abashed, we’re still waiting for the new electronic text fully to arrive.)

A dozen years on and the risky thrill of surfing has given way to the bourgeois fantasy of browsing. Idling one’s way along the aisles, one peruses goods which for their part offer no resistance, no threat, and very little surprise. In 2009, one knows just where one will go today. Hyperlinks do not startle or jar, and they may no longer even define the activity of browsing, which is now more often a matter of selecting a bookmark. Bookmarks at the ready, users visit the same few sites each day, and if Google or a blog entry points to an unfamiliar site there is little chance that clicking this link will open up new vistas of experience.

Cementing its mediacy, Web 1.0 adheres readily to the semiotic structure that pervades media studies: content-creator → content → audience. And unlike the digital in general, the breadth of the Web, while imposing, can be comfortably parsed into genres (blog, shopping, news, wiki, reference, search, chat, forum, etc.). (Of course there are outliers.) Having lost its threat and its thrill, the Web does not push against the boundaries of media, but situates itself as the new medium.

Web 2.0 purports to reverse all of that, reinjecting a lost dynamism into the ossified medial structure of the World Wide Web. By making the terminal positions of the medial chain overlap, the circuit of production and consumption collapses into itself, and this disruption leads to unpredictable and exciting reconfigurations of subjects and contents. ‘The endpoints are starting to inform the center’ (Markoff, 2005). By definition, Web 2.0 content remains to be determined, for the audience, using Web 2.0, generates content, and one does not decide in advance what they will come up with. Neither surfing nor browsing, the user of Web 2.0 contributes (or withholds contribution by lurking), creating the very content she peruses.[2] Announced to the public in 2005 (see Markoff), in the hushed tones reserved for developments that we oldsters will never fully grasp, Web 2.0 defies existing categories, like medium, and is so forward-looking that it already risks being leapfrogged. Those who embrace the insistent futurity of the digital are keen to usher in the next increment even before we have realized the imminent upgrade. Web 3.0 hovers in the middle distance, obscured by the singularity that must precede it, in all of its eschatological finality.

The Web and Immediacy

Befitting its claim to mediacy, Web 1.0 eschews the headlong rush toward a transparent interface so characteristic of other digital phenomena; rather than attempting to eliminate the interface as in virtual reality, the Web embraces its interface, the browser. Browsers have changed quite a bit over time, to accommodate alterations in standards for content encoding on the Web, to allow greater customization of the appearance and experience of browsing, and to render more efficient the most common browsing maneuvers; but the basic interface of the browser, including especially the strictly windowed display of information, shows no sign of erosion. As analyzed above, the stable and familiar activity of browsing characterizes the Web as medium, so it is no surprise that the browser persists as its significant medial symptom.[3]

Despite the persistence of the browser, the Web—even 1.0—is not immune to the fantasy of immediacy that propels so much of digital culture and technology. Immediacy seizes the Web not via a frontal attack that would simply eliminate the interface (the browser), but via an end-run that recapitulates the interface in a diversity of devices and channels. The Web’s particular brand of immediacy is most manifest in the increasing availability of access. No longer restricted to the personal computer, the Web is now available on cell phones, PDAs, handheld gaming systems, electronic readers, and other “personal” devices. Further, even while the browser remains dominant, its functions have been cannibalized and regurgitated piecemeal, to render key information available more immediately and effortlessly: specialized software constantly displays certain time-sensitive data from the Web, such as stock quotes, weather reports, or sports scores, while other software selectively browses and packages specific material like film reviews and search results, or sends a text message when your plane is late. The dream underlying this diffusion of the Web is a dream of unmediated and fully intuitive access: anytime, anyplace one should be able to retrieve any information. In fact, ideally desire should be adequate to its own fulfillment, so that one should as soon have the information as seek it. (Vannevar Bush might have forecast even this development, though to his credit he restricted his description of an associative universal database of information, the Memex, to technologies that were practically realizable even in his pre-transistor era.) Wearable computing, universal wireless coverage, a world encrusted with ID chips, ubiquitous computing, all aim toward the goal of immersion not in a simulated sensorium (VR) but in a sea of data.

Thus at least one popular account of the topology of the World Wide Web must be amended. The Web has been heralded as a flat space; lacking a center, growing rhizomatically and without imposed architecture, the Web refuses hierarchy so that each site is equally central, each page can lay claim to a perspective as valid as any other. The Web has no starting point and no inherent order, though there are plenty of local organizations and ad hoc impositions of structure. The lack of hierarchy has, it is claimed, significant economic and political consequence. For example, the availability of news from the broadest variety of sources with no official sanction given to one or another source means that audiences can choose whom to trust and can consider perspectives that would never show up in mainstream media. Because the flat organization of the Web implies a sort of populist economics of information, commercial interests that lack the resources to compete against the largest corporations can still find a healthy number of buyers. Moreover, the viral model of marketing, bolstered by the anti-hierarchical topology of the internet, means that the little guy might even come out on top: may the best product win! The flat Web, it is said, implies a level playing field.

Though these claims about the social and political implications of Web topology may have real merit, it is mistaken to describe the organization of the Web as an ‘infinite flat surface’ (Manovich, 2001: 76).[4] Lacking an architectonic structure, the Web’s particular fantasy of immediacy implies a topology best described not as flat but as a black hole: each point next to each other point, any page on the Web but a single click away, the maximum density of information. The image of a flat surface encourages the imposition of a metric on the space, a measure of distance that describes some points as closer and others as farther away. By contrast, the black hole distorts space and defies an overarching metric, allowing local and provisional measures of distance but ultimately insisting that any point might be proximal to any other.

With most points equally distant, the problem is not how to get to a given page but how to find the right ones. At its extreme, the dream of the intuitive interface implies an immediate access to information, such that the desire to know something would without effort call to mind its desideratum. Though this dream is driven by immediacy, it is not the typical fantasy of the virtual, for the black hole collapses the simulated space of VR. Rather, on the Web we dream of incorporating the machine into ourselves, making it part of consciousness. To swallow the machine not only keeps it always close but also eliminates the interface. (As we will see below, the dream of integrating the machine such that it becomes equal to one’s will is the driving force behind Web 2.0.) The transition from the fantasy of the virtual to that of intuition alters the corollary threat: taken to its fantastic limit in fiction, VR usually threatens to overwhelm its users. By contrast, at the limit of the fantasy of intuition on the Web, desire equals its fulfillment, so that the user herself becomes part of the flow of information: information as knowledge, information as memory. The black hole crushes into indistinction anyone caught in its orbit, flattening the division between user and data. The interface is thus replaced by intellection, at least according to this dream of internet immediacy. (Marie-Laure Ryan [1994] too calls forth this equivocation of desire and its fulfillment, describing the future [absence of] interface as a ‘language of the angels’, in which it is enough to think something that it become real.) In this fantasy we see the result of the collapse of the medial chain, where a total interactivity not only dissolves the distinction between author and audience but even between audience and content. Floating in a sea of data, the user has simply become those data, their availability part of her consciousness or memory.[5]

This endpoint should seem farfetched, even improbable, but the Web beckons to this fantasy of intuition.[6] The unification of all information, the elimination of division among dataspaces, the database of databases, the desire to index everything, the increasing inclusion and proposed standardization of metadata, the heads-up display of contextually appropriate information, even the banality of the push-delivery of sports scores through cell phones, these are the policies and products of the age of universal availability. ‘The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages’ (Kelly, 2006). If the dream of the digital is to eliminate the interface, to make the user’s desire equivalent to its realization, then on the Web this dream amounts to the elimination of the subject, who simply has the data, without having to wrestle an interface in order to get it. One must sacrifice only one’s self to become all-seeing and all-knowing.

The diminutive single click turns out thus to be crucial, for it sustains the user as subject and so also the Web as medium. Choosing not to click, the subject staves off the collapse of the Web into itself and the collapse of the subject into the Web. A minimal resistance, the quantum unit (one bit) of information, the single click (or rather, the option to withhold that click) holds at bay the entirety of the World Wide Web, placing just this page before the user and not the others. Absent the click, the Web would effectively collapse into itself, the user would no longer be separate from the data and would drown in those data, user and data dissolving into the “formless” digital that makes no distinction without a subject.[7] Choosing not to click, or choosing to click here and not here, the user defines her unique perspective on the World Wide Web, establishes her own experience as limited and tied to a place and time.

The single click therefore defines the subject as a subject; it represents her sole power not only to choose which page appears before her, but to separate herself from the mass of data that is the black hole of the World Wide Web. Maintaining her subjectivity—as the one who stands above and apart from the Web and also as the one who chooses which particular page will be viewed—the single click renders the Web a medium. For only as what stands between the subject and the data is the Web medial. The browser, even as it breaks apart and reconstitutes itself within Web 2.0, remains the symptom of the Web’s mediacy, the software that accepts and directs the single click. (While push delivery of information to computers and personal devices circumvents the single click, users must be very choosy about which feeds to display. Push delivery only works for a few choice bits of information before it becomes overwhelming; relinquishing the power of the click, we teeter on the brink of the black hole.)

The space of information has previously been compared to a black hole, though with a very different resonance. Martin Rosenberg (1994) describes hyperlinks as black holes, passages from one page to another. Even while employing the figure of the black hole, Rosenberg cautions against the uncritical appropriation of new physics as a revolutionary discourse, noting that such borrowings from science fail to recognize the ways in which science, even when tied to non-linear or discontinuous functions, still imposes a stable geometry on its objects of study, denying them the truly dynamic character that a revolutionary theory would seem to require. In this regard, he privileges the moment of passage through the hyperlink, (what I have called the single click), as the sole possibility of a disorientation severe enough to count as a revolutionary destabilization, but he warns that this moment is too fleeting, and that the reader soon reorients herself in the new space.[8] Readers are momentarily uprooted from normal consciousness when they click on a link, but soon reestablish a stable perspective in relation to the new page that comes up. Though provocative, this view of the Web is dated, reflecting the excited sense of potential that surrounded the notion of hyperlinks at the end of the last century. Linking, which was only a marginally revolutionary possibility even in Rosenberg’s account, has now become simply a normal experience and no longer destabilizes the reader. The black hole does not represent the possibility of escape from the banality of linear text but only the promise of a total availability of information which is also the threat of a total absorption into the machine.

The Web as Metamedium

Though the hyperlink may no longer destabilize the reading process on the World Wide Web, it does both promote and defer the fantasy of the Web as black hole. As the clickable passage from page to page, the hyperlink represents the immediate proximity of every linked page, the tie that binds. In this spirit, Manovich (2001: 172) cites Paul Virilio: ‘at least in principle, every point on earth is now instantly accessible from any other point on earth’. But inasmuch as each page contains only certain links and not others, the reality of the hyperlink (as opposed to its fantasy) is to render only a small subset of the Web immediately available. The logical space of the World Wide Web consists of numerous organizations or perspectives, wherein each page brings near some part of the Web and places more distant the rest.[9] Just as the resistance of the single click makes the user a subject and the Web a medium, so each page constitutes a unique perspective on the Web, an organizational overview of the information space, (literally) underlining some pages and leaving most of the space of the Web to hover implicitly in the background.

This role of the hyperlink as structuring element gives new meaning to the claim that the Web is a metamedium. Certainly the Web mediates other media, and certainly the Web has brought about the creation of new genres and even new media. But its most essential function, its most consistent purpose across its many genres is to organize information, to present other media and other Web pages as more or less distant from the subject. To construct a page on the Web is to create a perspective, to privilege selected content and encourage ready access to particular information, to thrust forth and even forge certain relationships. This suggests a new reason for applying Kay’s neologism metamedium to the World Wide Web: the Web is a metamedium in the sense that it is a medium for the organization or structuring of information, a medium for providing diverse perspectives on a vast and unwieldy mass of information. ‘This may imply that new digital rhetoric may have less to do with arranging information in a particular order and more to do simply with selecting what is included and what is not included in the total corpus presented’ (Manovich, 2001: 78, fn13). Meta- here indicates the shift from an emphasis on content proper to an emphasis on its structure or organization. Inasmuch as each page offers a perspective on the entire Web, the Web pushes content into the background, privileging instead the presentation of structure or form. A Web page organizes information into a hierarchy of near and distant, and its metamedial function is precisely the presentation of this hierarchy. Each page is effectively an index to the entirety of the Web, but it is a critical index whose meaning derives from the choices of what to frontload and what to leave in the background.

This metamedial charge of the World Wide Web prompts its past and current development. To promote the role of the Web as organizer of information, technical standards increasingly mandate the separation of form from content, effectively allowing the independent analysis and manipulation of the perspective itself, regardless of what content it provides a perspective on. Cascading style sheets (CSS) explicitly divorce the appearance of information from its content, and more fundamentally treat appearance in terms of structural characteristics. That is, a given object on a Web page (paragraph, image, sound, etc.) is labeled in terms of its structural properties, placed within a hierarchy that records its functional relationships independently of its actual content. By analyzing CSS, one can read something about the structure of a Web page without attending to the specific content of the text or other elements on the page.

CSS, which has been widely adopted across the Web and incorporated into all recent Web design software, is only one prominent example of the push toward foregrounding structure as the Web’s modus operandi. More broadly, HTML is slowly being superseded by XHTML, which latter standard is based on the greater flexibility and syntactical rigidity of XML, and this too means increasing facility in treating structure without regard to content. (One could gloss XML as a system for formalizing content so that it becomes a feature of structure.) The incorporation of metadata into the underlying code for Web pages similarly provides information that describes the structural relations of that page to its outside. Metadata are keywords and other information that do not appear when a page is viewed normally, but that are incorporated into the code for the page to help identify the nature of its content. The Semantic Web project is one extreme example of this practice, where metadata provide information, for example, about the relationships among terms on the page and not just the appearance of those terms. Even the Document Object Model instituted early in the life of HTML furthers this goal, encapsulating each element on a Web page (as well as the page itself) under a single name, so that its relationships to other elements come into sharper focus.

Alan Liu (2004) identifies this push to separate form from content as the driving force behind the progress of networking technologies. Though he acknowledges the extraordinary power of this approach–which allows a reader (or, as Liu underlines, a machine) to gain a perspective on information independently of the information itself–he also notes a sinister dimension to this trend. Given the Web’s power to manipulate perspective, content is increasingly deemphasized to the point ‘where an author in effect surrenders the act of writing to that of parameterization’ (59, my emphasis); content comes to fall ‘outside the normal play or (as we now say) networking of discourse’ (60). The desire to rein in an unruly overload of information (the World Wide Web) through technical measures that organize that information according to structural categories leads to the abdication of authorship. The Web as metamedium is a tool for creating perspectives on information, but this tends to hypostatize the very idea of a perspective to the detriment of meaningful information itself. The user, focused on establishing perspectives, no longer engages critically with content, entrusting the generation of content to the vastness of hyperspace. Manovich (2001: 127): ‘The World Wide Web [...] encourages the creation of texts that consist entirely of pointers to other texts that are already on the Web. One does not have to add any original writing; it is enough to select from what already exists’. Once again, the fantasy of intuition–already intruding upon reality in this case–cuts both ways, providing a more efficient access to just those data the user desires while in the same stroke eliminating the singularity of authorship by yielding authorial responsibility to the network. To cast the Web as a metamedium is to void the medium in favor of the meta-; for all its massive gravity, the black hole, at its limit, turns out to contain nothing.

Two brief examples, search spaces and blogs. Search engines use algorithms to filter information. While some of this filtering is based on content, what usually distinguishes one engine from another is how it evaluates structure. That is, a search engine chooses to filter and order its results largely on the basis of non-contentual aspects of the pages being searched, such as how many other pages link to it or how frequently it has been accessed. Search engines thus provide perspectives on information by analyzing perspectives on information, doubly earning the prefix meta-. Blogs are as often as not about the act of blogging, a reflexivity that demonstrates explicitly the way in which content disappears in favor of the analysis of form. Moreover, the genre of the blog nearly mandates that each blog must refer to other blogs, so that the dynamics of the blogosphere are based largely on the interlinking or cross-referencing of various blogs. The skeletal schema of a blog entry is just a link to another blog entry.

Immediacy 2.0

Web 2.0 coincides authors and readers, producers and users. The collapse of the medial schema makes for a particularly strange form of mediacy, as the equation of author and audience generates a kind of immediacy by default. Self-expression and thus also self-recognition become the defining experiences of Web 2.0, such that the Web is both mediate and immediate at the same time. How far does this paradox extend?

Alex Galloway might credit standards, or protocol in his terms, for deemphasizing content and promoting instead the Web page as placeholder, a canvas on which the user can paint what she will. Standards like TCP, XML, and CSS are neutral with respect to content. By formally separating content from the package that surrounds it, our computers can work with those packages regardless of their content, a protocological agnosticism. Since protocols remain ‘indifferent to the content of information contained within’ them (2004: 52), one can “author” a Web page without actually creating any content, just by leveraging available standards. Web 2.0 then appears to be a natural consequence of the ubiquity of standards; mature standards help to vacate content on the Web, so that Web pages start blank and their contents appear eventually to spring up as if from culture at large.

The mathematical theory of communication supports this development. The more universal and specific are the standards that regulate the passage of information, the less information any given message contains. Mathematically, information is a measure of how surprising or unanticipated are the data that arrive, while a standard makes the possible data more anticipated. A rigorous standard allows the receiver to predict much about the message to be received. It is as though more and more of the information is itself built into the infrastructure of computing, so that we no longer pass information but just conduct ourselves according to the standard. Inasmuch as Web 2.0 establishes standards on top of standards, templates awaiting completion by users who fill in the blanks, the range of information narrows. To contribute to Web 2.0 is not so much to originate an idea as to adopt an available position.

No wonder that the fantasy of Web 2.0 recasts the nature of authorship. First, the mantle of authorship moves from authorized content-creators to users. Those who formerly provided content now generate forms awaiting contributions, portals that fill with data from other sites, blank slates on which users may inscribe their desires. But even those users mostly defer full-fledged authority, choosing instead to circulate or affirm existing information. Bloggers link compulsively to other blogs, reproducing content or just redirecting readers with any number of gestures that boil down to ‘Check this out!’. YouTube videos bury the author and assert his insignificance as an individual; his role in creating the video is relatively minor compared to the many who comment on it (‘Sick!’, or ‘Adorable!’, or of course ‘LOL’), and who, simply by viewing, promote the video to the point of broad recognition, voting with their clicks. These masses supply Web 2.0 with its content, not only by uploading but by transmitting, by referring, by linking, and by starring in all their banality as the subjects of the videos. The content of the video only confirms its collective authorship, as most YouTube clips are remarkable for their mundanity. YouTube documents ordinary lives, the silly things that anyone might do, the footage that could have been shot in your backyard. A significant portion of the meaning of a YouTube video derives from its claim to everydayness, its status as generic cultural expression. The subjects of these videos are us, just as the directors and the viewers are also us. Collectively we must be the authors of these videos, for they claim to represent and define us.

YouTube videos seem to become popular by already being popular, an information-age version of the adage about the rich getting richer. There is a strange kind of circularity or bootstrapping underlying Web 2.0, visible in countless examples but best seen in that hallmark of Web culture, the meme. (YouTube is home to many memes.) Memes come from nowhere in particular. They succeed not because they are exceptional but because they are everyday. We view and enjoy them with a wink, marveling as much at their clumsiness or amateurishness as at their humor or pathos. What we most enjoy in a meme is the bizarre realization that ‘this is culture’, that the meme represents ourselves. Their provenance rarely matters, for they thrive, regardless of where they come from, by virtue of being passed around or referenced. Transmission eclipses content in a meme; a meme is what it is because it gets passed around, affirmed by a collective viewership. Neither the content nor the medium but participation itself is the message. Deprecating its banal content, a meme foregrounds its status as meme, inviting viewers to click as the formal acknowledgement of participation. To view a meme is not to appraise its content but to assert its status as representative of culture and to assert one’s own status as purveyor of that culture. We pass along a meme because that is what it means to belong to this new Web culture: Web 2.0 is undoubtedly a fetish.

The fantasy is that, with enough participation, content arises from out of culture at large, reflecting our collective beliefs, opinions, and ideas. Each user gets to assent to those expressions that suit her, authorship having disappeared in favor of selection, a menu-driven collective creativity. Individuals are represented just to the extent that they subjugate their individuality to the zeitgeist, proclaiming in many voices nothing more than their willing complicity, a common message whose content is its commonality. (‘I love Big Brother‘?) Each contributes to Web 2.0 but only as a generic representative, not an individual but a subject position that rightly claims authorship of the collective expression that is Web 2.0.

From online shoe stores and book stores to recipe sites and film review databases, users chime in with perspectives that are their own but also enunciations of culture. That is, Web users feel obliged to speak for themselves precisely because their ideas and opinions are representative, how others will also likely feel. (This is partly why so much discourse on Web 2.0 is me-too-ism. One writes not in order to say something but in order to have one’s say.) Writing under generic pseudonyms that express roles more than individuals (‘frequentbookbuyer1001′ or ‘iluvvideocameras’), users shoulder the burden they have welcomed, to generate the future by weaving the Web. Each capsule review, each editorial response, each partisan contribution an assertion of belonging to a collective that owns the products of its self-fulfilling enterprise. The opinion aggregator, from tag clouds to last.fm to Netflix to StumbleUpon, captures the essence of Web 2.0, masking its users’ identities behind the collective weight of their approval. One freely offers one’s valuable opinions, knowing that they inevitably become the views of the collective. This is not altruistic as much as it is a means of constructing culture and simultaneously constructing oneself as its representative. The Digg is the minimal representative gesture of Web 2.0, the simple thumbs-up that, combined with everyone else’s thumbs, constitutes content. If the single click as described above maintains the Web as a medium, the Digg, expressed in a single click, dissolves the individual into the participating collective, the owners of culture. ‘You won’t find editors at Digg—we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online’ (Digg.com, 2008).

The pretzel logic of Web 2.0 finally realizes the immediacy that has been the dream of the digital since its inception, driving its relentless progress. Abdicating content and recasting authorship, Web 2.0 presents itself as a blank page on which each user selects what to foreground, representing her individuality as a matter not of creativity or desire but of perspective. The Web becomes a reflexive nest of perspectives on itself, a simulacrum that severs its ties to the ground of authorship and declares itself equal to culture, from which it arises autochthonously. No gap exists between culture and its expression, no individual can fail to recognize herself in this new Web of perspective since she is, after all, invited to generate there her own perspective, representing her “unique” relationship of collective belonging. Alienation on Web 2.0 is impossible, for there is no individual who could be alienated. The fantasy of intuition returns full force: of course Web 2.0 knows what you want, for Web 2.0 is you. Emptied of content, Web 2.0 expresses only the fact of belonging to culture, the formal declaration of participation that is the collective auto-constitution of culture. When users are producers, when audience becomes actors, all the world’s a stage and performance equals reality. Web 2.0 achieves immediacy by default, not a reflection of culture but the total of culture, the zeitgeist materialized. A strange paradox then that this immediacy of Web 2.0 should be so highly mediated. The new Web expresses you just to the extent that you affirm your belonging by embracing a mediated existence. The immediacy of Web 2.0, its claim to be culture, operates only as long as culture itself contains the structure of technological mediation. You are not a member of our culture unless you express yourself and discover yourself on the Web, which is to say, via the computer. The persistence of the browser evinces a residual mediacy, but this mediacy is now a mere formality, an element subsumed under the immediacy of Web 2.0. Finally the computer knows what you want.

Post Script

Wozniak vindicated? ‘Early on with the first Apples, we had these dreams that the computer would let you know what you wanted to do’ (Stern, 2007).

When Eve eats the first apple, man discovers his humanity: alienation from nature and from God is the human condition, but the Fall is also the condition of freedom and responsibility. Wozniak dreams the undoing of the Fall; this time the first Apples, rather than leaving you to your own devices, let you know what you want, resubmit humans to a nature and thus to a (digital) God who rules that nature. After all, the computer that tells you what you want provides not only your desire but also its satisfaction: the black whole.

Author’s Biography

Aden Evens is Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College. Having misspent his youth as a computer programmer, Aden completed a doctorate on the ethics of Gilles Deleuze, published a book, Sound Ideas, on the phenomenology of music technology, and is currently researching the creative possibilities and limitations of the digital.

Notes

[1] Marie-Laure Ryan: ‘VR is not so much a medium in itself, as a technology for the synthesis of all media’ (1994: §6).
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[2] Even lurking is a form of contribution, as one’s patterns of browsing generate value to be mined.
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[3] MIT Media Lab scientist Michael Bove (2000) conducts research aimed at eliminating the browser by extracting it from the personal computer and incorporating its functions into television and other household appliances. Notably, he describes this process as one in which the Web becomes ‘just a medium’, presumably because abandoning the computing interface allays the threats to mediacy characteristic of the computer: ‘What has to happen before the Internet becomes just a medium is the disassociation of the services from the Web browser’. Though Bove claims that eliminating the browser is the key to establishing the Web as a medium, his motive is the normalization and stabilization of the Web’s function for information retrieval, which he believes is threatened by the cumbersome interface of the personal computer.
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[4] Though the image of the Web as flat is widely repeated, it is not commonly held among those who actually study the Web’s topology. Foremost among such theorists is Alex Galloway, whose principal argument in Protocol is that the lack of hierarchy is a myth and a dangerous one at that. While some of the standards that allow communication over the Web are egalitarian and decentralized, others are utterly hierarchical. This is an important and perceptive correction to the popular image of a flat Web topology, but it applies to the structure of power on the Internet and not primarily to the structure of information. Power exerts a real influence over the organization of information, so that, for example, the Web has a disproportionate number of pages written in English, but there is still no center, no index, no hierarchy of information, nor anything even approaching one.
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[5] The fantasy of intuition is not the only force driving digital development but it remains most compelling. Witness the film Æon Flux, where the interface is inside the subject: computer graphics show an animated view of the character Æon’s brain chemistry sparking into action, while she abandons her external milieu and finds herself, phenomenally at least, in a space of immediate communication and information. In this space, her interactions (conversations, queries) are only a matter of willing, the interface is a pure cognition.
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[6] The current fervor regarding search space on the Web (Google, Yahoo, etc.) attests to the dire need for a perspective on a set of data that is otherwise simply overwhelming. Since the beginnings of the Web’s popularity, it has been said that the killer app is the algorithm that will find just those data one was searching for. This evinces again the ambiguity between the computer as tool and the computer as intuition: the correct algorithm will produce not only the page for which the user was searching but will also generate results that the user did not know to look for but will find eminently helpful.
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[7] Compare Mark Hansen (2004: 11), who describes the digital as without its own form, waiting for the human perceptive body to ‘enframe’ it and give it a form. Or Alex Galloway (2004: 52): ‘digital information is nothing but an undifferentiated soup of ones and zeros’.
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[8] Rosenberg (1994: 289-­290): ‘Yet, except for the dislocations made possible by the leaps through the nodes of a hypertext, what really occurs is that the attention of an observer simply becomes shifted from one geometry to another. Differences may exist between one geometry and another, but from the perspective of avant-garde polemic, no fundamental change can occur in the framing of human awareness by regulated space and time, as exemplified by the reading process, except in that brief moment of nodal dislocation’. Rosenberg’s article focuses on debunking rhetoric that draws revolutionary conclusions in the humanities from non-linear physics, and he spends too little time (at least given my interests) examining the exceptional situation of the hyperlink.
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[9] A game demonstrating the principle of distance and proximity on the Web was discussed in various forums around the turn of the century: ‘Web that Smut’ (also called ‘Six Degrees of Pornography’) placed each player in front of his computer, with his browser pointed at an agreed-upon ‘innocent’ starting page on the Web. The aim was to travel to a page of pornography in the fewest clicks. The claim of this game is not only that the Web approaches an ideal of total proximity, but that this same ideal includes carnal desire, the crush of Web pages incorporating into its midst a mass of erogenous flesh.
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References

Æon Flux. Dir. Karyn Kusama, perf. Charlize Theron, screenplay by Matt Manfredi and Phil Hay, characters created by Peter Chung, MTV (2005).

Baldwin, Sandy. ‘Purple Dotted Underlines: Microsoft Word and the End of Writing’, AfterImage 30:1 (July/Aug. 2002): 6-­7.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).

Bove, V. Michael, Jr. ‘Will Anyone Really Need a Web Browser in Five Years’, unpublished research statement available at http://web.media.mit.edu/~vmb/papers/Bove-Montreux2000.pdf (2000).

Bruns, Axel. ‘The Future Is User-Led: The Path towards Widespread Produsage’, fibreculture 11 (2008), http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue11/issue11_bruns.html.

Bush, Vannevar. ‘As We May Think’, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly (July 1945), HTML version by Denys Duchier, University of Ottawa (April 1994).

Digg.com. ‘Digg-Overview’, http://digg.com/about/ (2008).

Galloway, Alex. Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004).

Hansen, Mark. New Philosophy for New Media, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004).

Kay, Alan. ‘Computer Software’, in Paul Mayer (ed.) Computer Media and Communication: A Reader, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 129­-137. Originally from Scientific American (September 1984).

Kelly, Kevin. ‘Scan This Book!’, The New York Times (13 May 2006).

Liu, Alan. ‘Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History of Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse’, Critical Inquiry 31:1 (Autumn 2004): 49­-84.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).

Markoff, John. ‘Web Content by and for the Masses’, The New York Times (29 June 2005).

McGann, Jerome. Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web, (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

Rosenberg, Martin. ‘Physics and Hypertext: Liberation and Complicity in Art and Pedagogy’, in George Landow (ed.) Hyper/Text/Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1994), 268-­298.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. ‘Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory’, Post-Modern Culture 5:1 (1994), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v005/5.1ryan.html.

Stern, Joanna. ‘The Way It Woz: Steve Wozniak on All Things Apple’ (interview), Laptop: Mobile Solutions for Business & Life (26 October, 2007), http://www.laptopmag.com/news/interviews/the-way-it-woz.aspx.

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)?

In light of the strange space and odd temporal dimension it inhabits, it seems appropriate to call web 2.0 an ‘event’. Something has certainly happened to the web as we knew it circa 2001 and that something is both a new technical infrastructure for online ICTs – what is now referred to as ‘an architecture of participation’ (O’Reilly, 2004) – and a change in attitude, a change in the ways we think about doing, communicating and inhabiting networks. The web 2.0 event moves the technical infrastructure of networks even closer to the transitive, to the nature of event itself. Events are things that happen to things, aren’t they? Perhaps not, especially when we are dealing with phenomena that are truly dynamic, where change, hence unpredictability and fuzziness, is their immanent modality. When we start to flesh out what the event ‘web 2.0′ comprises, it is not some thing (a technology, an attitude) happening to some thing (web 1.0, information-based networks) already existing. Rather, with its dynamic apping of education for example, web 2.0 as event also opens up the question of the event itself: when and where is it?

In this issue of FCJ, Web 2.0: before, during and after the event, we are as much interested in opening up a space for thinking how networked events might look, feel and impart themselves as we are in adding to critical thinking about particular web 2.0 phenomena. We want to put forward a proposition that goes something like this: web to the nth dimension could be a contemporary and collective movement, an event in research and thought creation, and web 2.0 might just be a version, one extended duration within that larger movement. By this, we mean that critical thinking, researching and writing about networks has entered the space and time of a phenomenal, explosive and singular event, web to the ‘n’. We want to think with/in this milieu. Web 2.0 may only be part of that broader movement in thought but it certainly presents an opportunity, perhaps a vital and critical one, to both grasp, and pause during, the event that is networked thinking. Thinking right now about web 2.0, thinking about it in critical and inventive ways, as the essays published in this issue do, is part of participating with this broader event—and of thinking networked events beyond the buzz of the immediacy of new apps, social media or service platforms.

The event and events

This is also to think about the nature of events, including media events and their envelopment of/by other events. It is also perhaps to rethink the “evental” newness of what we seem to have finally stopped calling “new media”.

Thought about “the event” is complex. Thinking about, reporting on, actual events can often be banal and overly simplified. Events pile up: the football grand final, three tsunamis in the Pacific, a typhoon and several massive earthquakes in south-east Asia, an apology to the stolen generation, a change of government. The list goes on. The constant roll out and stockpiling of events serves to trivialise everything that’s going on. It’s sometimes hard to see “an event” for all the events through which it moves. Perhaps this is what prompted Gilles Deleuze to propose that “the” event, ‘is eternally that which has just happened and that which is about to happen, but never that which is happening.’ (Deleuze,1990: 8). And yet things were not so simple for Deleuze either, when it came to thinking the specificity of ‘an’ event, this event rather than that one. Here as well, Deleuze and Guattari insisted on thinking through what happened in the middle of things, taking into account the temporality of the event, and it’s being “out of time”. All events lie between that which had happened and that which was about to come into being. Event time, for them, was precisely this middle, floating time—sometimes referred to in their work as the haecciety (Deleuze and Guattari,1989: 260-2)—in which the singularity of the event is brought into being, is produced, is individuated. But rather than providing a description of a type of event (sporting, catastrophic, crowd-pleasing), their investigation of the singularity of an event’s time was ontogenetic, exploring the conditions under which an event is brought into making.

More recently, Alan Badiou has suggested that this preoccupation with ontogenesis, with the event’s ongoing production or becoming, facilitates a certain thinking of the event in which persistence and return are privileged over difference (2007: 38). For him, the event signals instead a radical break with what has been, with what has already become; it is that which allows life, time and thought to become other. Web 2.0 might very well sit between both these lofty and complex articulations of the event, as that event whose time and conditions of production must be thought again and again, and as that which must be thought differently. In this issue we asked for contributions that were able to think web 2.0 via both continuity and difference: as a break with the good old world wide web, as a continuation of certain new medial logics, and as something finite that we might well be ready to move beyond. So what has been important in orienting this FCJ issue as a contribution to thinking the event of web 2.0 is writing that does not simply report on or describe web 2.0 phenomena:

… language use is not primarily the communication of information but a matter of acting in or upon the world: event attributions do not simply describe or report pre-existing events, they help to actualize particular events in the social field. (Patton, 1997)

With this idea of the potential to actualise something that naming possesses—web 2.0 sprouts industry 2.0 exploits friends 2.0 and so on—we sought contributions that critically actualised the event of web 2.0 in the networked writing field.

In the event of web 2.0…

Although our take on the event emphasises ongoingness, a permanent ontogenesis, rather than Badiou’s rupture, we nonetheless believe in the importance of being specific and situated, especially about media logics and histories. In his article ‘Dreams of a new medium’, Aden Evens plunges into the middle of this historio-ontogenetic methodology by examining web 2.0 in terms of both its medial antecedents and the ways in which it generates a different relation to mediation altogether. Like many new media technical dreams, he argues, web 2.0 exhibits a desire for immediacy—the desire to dissolve the medium in a soup of technically enhanced presence. This, he suggests, marks web 2.0 with a decisively different flavour from web 1.0, which proudly proclaimed its medial character through an unabashed foregrounding of the browser. Instead web 2.0 collapses the traditional “end points” of sender and receiver of the classical communication schema by suggesting that the web (2.0) is us/you:

Web 2.0 coincides authors and readers, producers and users. The collapse of the medial schema makes for a particularly strange form of mediacy, as the equation of author and audience generates a kind of immediacy by default. Self-expression and thus also self-recognition become the defining experiences of Web 2.0, such that the Web is both mediate and immediate at the same time. (Evens, 2009)

Although Evens’ article does not deal with a list or categories of aspects of web 2.0, its ability to get at a media logic (rather than a more general protocologic of networks as Galloway and Thacker’s work does), provides us with a profound explanation for the “me-ness” of all things, activities and qualities of web 2.0 today.

The critical ontogenetic approach to web 2.0 really comes into its own in Ganaele Langlois, Fenwick McKelvey, Greg Elmer, and Kenneth Werbin’s ‘Mapping Commercial Web 2.0 Worlds: Towards a New Critical Ontogenesis’. As the authors acknowledge, the feedback loop between user-driven content and participation, on the one hand, and the commercialisation of web 2.0 space by Facebook, Google and now increasingly catch-ups from Microsoft et. al, on the other hand, has been often noted and analysed. But the perspective Langlois and her co-authors bring is refreshing. They argue that this feedback loop is actively being produced and worked, and is constitutive of the web 2.0 environment itself. The shaping of commercial web spaces via technical infrastructure, code and design architectures is a conditioning activity in so far as it allows users to “use” in particular ways. Share, says Facebook for example, but don’t share alike, only with your network (market) of Facebook friends:

… commercial Web 2.0 platforms are not simply about facilitating user-produced content and carrying content across networks to large audiences ‘end-users’; rather, they are primarily concerned with establishing the technocultural conditions within which users can produce content and within which content and users can be re-channeled through techno-commercial networks and channels. (Langlois et al, 2009)

Crucially what ‘Mapping Commercial Web 2.0 Worlds’ performs is another shift away from a generalised network logic toward what the authors describe as a ‘code politics’ of web 2.0. This project complements Evens’ one of differently understanding the medial nature of web 2.0. Langlois et. al. argue that where a user might feel that communication via web 2.0 apps and plugins allows for instantaneous (immediate) recommendations of personal likes and dislikes to be sent to others via the push of a hyperlink, the “feeling” is in fact crunched via algorithmic processing and averaging of mass user profiles into patterns. The PageRank algorithm is only the most notorious example of this. A critical ontogenesis of the event of web 2.0, then, requires investigation into what processes and interests drive the coding of web 2.0 as user-generated space.

event break

Speaking of immediacy, mediation and instantaneous effects of all kinds, as editors, authors, researchers and readers, surely the most pleasurable aspect of web 2.0 and its apps, activities and participatory warmth and fuzziness must be that ‘straight-to-web’ publishing feeling? We did want to indulge that guilty pleasure in this issue, in spite of the critical and necessary work performed by ontogenetic thought production! In what is a bit of a break with the format of past FCJ issues, we decided to re-publish some straight-to-web 2.0 articles. The section of this issue which holds the title of ‘Contexts and Provocations’ is comprised of three pieces of inspired, although non-peer reviewed (by us at any rate), writing about the phenomenon of web 2.0. The articles—’The Digital Given:10 Web 2.0 Theses’ by Ippolita, Geert Lovink & Ned Rossiter; ‘Co-creation and the new industrial paradigm of peer production’ by Michael Bauwens; and ‘“Web 2.0?” as a new context for artistic practices’ by Juan Martin Prada—have appeared online in blogs, lists and art-projects/journals. In other words, this writing has appeared in web 2.0 environments which comprise the reflective spectrum and opportunities that participatory publishing affords contemporary concept creation. It was important to us that this issue of FCJ reflected and bounced-off those spaces, capturing some of their immediacy, intensity and effort; the effort of producing ideas in the push-pull, collapsed, medial ecology of apps, lists, loud and whispering others that is this very web to the nth dimension, we are trying to collectively enunciate through this issue. Rather than explicate these articles here, we urge you to go straight to them and read them in dialogue with our peer-reviewed section, to sit amidst the varying speeds of differing movements—immediate and reflective—in networked thinking.

event breakdown

What happens if, while the event is playing itself out, it turns out to be radically different from what has been anticipated? What if it doesn’t deliver on its promises and perhaps even fails? As Ien Ang and Nayantara Pothen bravely show us in their article, ‘Between Promise and Practice: Web 2.0, Intercultural Dialogue and Digital Scholarship’, web 2.0 hopes can often fail when put to the test. Their contribution to this issue of FCJ is important because their work reflectively discusses an actual project in which humanities’ researchers produced a customised web 2.0 environment, the diversCities project. This was designed to promote intercultural dialogue between participants in Sydney, Singapore and Mumbai. Ang and Pothen both describe and analyse the concrete design, technical, cultural and research specific issues that arose in the process of building such a project. It’s not so much that we should ‘learn’ from their ‘mistakes’. Instead what can be garnered from such an honest and detailed reflection upon contemporary modes of research production and process, are the deep assumptions and epistemological biases that still exert a hold over scholarly practice in a “digital age”, such as the felt need for gate-keeping and the habitual milieu of text-based exchange. But as the authors note, these habits and assumptions came head-to-head in the diverCities project with political and techno-utopian ideals about web 2.0 that revolve around the hope for participatory democracies.

Ben Roberts takes the critique of the assumed participatory and democratic character of web 2.0 into its own in his piece, ‘Beyond the “Networked Public Sphere”: Politics, Participation and Technics in Web 2.0′. In what is probably one of the most thoughtful critiques of Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, Roberts shows that Benkler’s formulation of the network is itself steeped in a politically neutralised understanding of communication. He compares Benkler’s conclusions about networked communication leading to freer participatory possibilities (liberal neo-market-based democracies) to the work done by Bernard Stiegler and Marc Crépon. The latter challenge us to think about participation as a political-economic problem to be solved rather than a media-communications one.

Roberts, then, points us to a “beyond” web 2.0 but not one in which we are urged to seek the next next thing. Instead this “beyond” joins up with many of the questions raised by the various critiques, manifestos, raves and qualifications about web 2.0—slices of which we’ve re-published in our straight-to-web segment. Questions about the persistence of a promissary drive that continues to haunt movements of networked thought. Perhaps what is important to keep in mind about the event of web 2.0 is that, like all events, it grasps toward its own future. But what that future is, is yet to be determined. We could certainly go a long way towards a more ‘open’ determination if we admit failure, code politics and the like into a thoughtful re-evaluation of how the contours of its networked-scape are in actuality unfolding.

Editors’ Biographies

Anna Munster is a writer, artist and educator in the area of new media arts and theory. In 2006 she published the book Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Dartmouth College Press). She helped to found the Fibreculture Journal and is actively involved in online list cultures and their on and offline projects and events. She works collaboratively with Michele Barker in the area of immersive and multi-channel audio-visual installation, exploring the relationship of visuality and neuroscience. Munster works as an associate professor at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia. Her current research investigates dynamic media, particularly the relations between the technical aspects of networks and network visualisations on the one hand, and emergent forms of cultural and aesthetic experience on the other.

Andrew Murphie (http://www.andrewmurphie.org/) is the Founding Editor of the Fibreculture Journal and Associate Professor in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales, Australia. Recent publications include: ‘Performance as the Distribution of Life: from Aeschylus to Chekhov to VJing via Deleuze and Guattari’, ‘Differential Life, Perception and the Nervous Elements: Whitehead, Bergson and Virno on the Technics of Living’ and, with John Potts, the book Culture and Technology. Forthcoming publications include ‘Deleuze, Guattari and Neuroscience’ and, with Lone Bertelsen, ‘An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Félix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain’. He also works with Anna Munster, Brian Massumi and Adrian Mackenzie on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project: Dynamic Media: innovative social and artistic developments in new media in Australia, Britain, Canada and Scandinavia since 1990. He has in the past pretended to be an amateur VJ, as VJ Comfy, and sometimes works with the Senselab in Montréal, and with Kolding Design School, Denmark.

References

Badiou, Alain. ‘The event in Deleuze’, J. Roffe trans., Parrhesia 2 (2007): 37–44, http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/issue02.html.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin Boundas, (London: Athlone Press, 1990).

Evans, Aden. (2009), ‘Dreams of a new medium’ Web 2.0: before, during and after the event, the Fibreculture Journal, 14, http://fourteen.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-092-dreams-of-a-new-medium/

Langlois, Ganaele, McKelvey, Fenwick, Elmer, Greg, and Werbin, Kenneth. (2009), ‘Mapping Commercial Web 2.0 Worlds: Towards a New Critical Ontogenesis’,Web 2.0: before, during and after the event, the Fibreculture Journal, 14, http://fourteen.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-095-mapping-commercial-web-2-0-worlds-towards-a-new-critical-ontogenesis/.

O’Reilly, Tim. ‘The Architecture of Participation’, O’Reilly (June, 2004), http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/architecture_of_participation.html.

O’Reilly, Tim. ‘What Is Web 2.0:Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software’, O’Reilly (September, 2005), http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html.

Patton, Paul. ‘The World Seen From Within: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Events’, Theory & Event 1.1 (1997), http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/theory_and_event/v001/1.1patton.html.

Anna Munster and Andrew Murphie
University of New South Wales, Sydney