Milwaukee.
OK, I'm soldiering on for the last of today's sessions at AoIR 2009 - can't wait to get back to my room and sleep off this illness, though. Hopefully I'll feel better for my session tomorrow! This session is on theorising Web 2.0, and we begin with Jacob Thomas Matthews. he begins by questioning Web 2.0 as a term, and suggests the collaboative Web as an alternative way of describing this phenomenon. Either way, this is often described as a substantial cultural shift which may lead to the emergence of a new participatory culture which empowers the user.
What needs to be examined here are the complex ties between content and information producers and the wider cultural and communication industries, and the way they are changing as a result of Web 2.0. These recent changes stand in line with a much longer history, of course, and the collaborative Web is reinforcing the links between consumer goods and service industries, and the cultural and communication industries. Web 2.0 contributes to the structuring of domestiv life and private time-space, it goes hand in hand with the construction of social networks as virtual spaces where information, including commercial promotion, circulates; brands associate their images to Web 2.0 devices and services, and back-office Web 2.0 devices allow sites to produce significant marketing data in order to promote and capitalise products and services. So, from a socioeconomic perspective, Web 2.0 is an externality, designed for promoting and selling other goods.
The Web 2.0 phenomenon is linked to the development of the notion of a network society, and a significant step in a long-term ideological trend accompanying major social and economic shifts. Users are far more deeply inserted into these processes (they are no longer simply consumers); user-generated material is also used in corporate contexts, then, and the empowerment and gratification of users ultimately mainly serves corporate targets, as well as improving surveillance and efficiency. Marketing data is an especially important aspect of Web 2.0 content creation, in fact - such information is 'solid gold' for corporations, and few researchers see a discrepancy between this and the discourse of user empowerment.
Indeed, even when a user is unproductive from a cultural or informational perspective, they are producing themselves. This is the rise of an included responsible user who exists through exchanges on on the network, actively contributing to capitalisation processes; this is the shaping of a new subject that is wholly adapted to market-based society. Web 2.0 can be considered to be an externality, then, in its capacity to reinforce the cultural and communication industries system on the one hand, and also in its ability to contribute to the formation of a vast electronic marketplace.
Henry Jenkins provides an idealist pespective on this, with collaborationist promises of participatory culture as contributing to capitalisation; if such network-based utopias become reality, then critical thought is pointless, social scientists must rid themselves of archaic theoretical postures. By contrast, Jenkins sees the denouncement of capitalism through Internet studies as an exaggeration of the power of large corporations and an underestimation of effective user empowerment, and entreats academics to promote participatory, collaboratory culture.
But are such socioeconomic postulates flawed? The persistence of the commodity form is the first undeniable stumbling block here, Jacob suggests.
