Abstracts
Aden Evens—Dreams of a New Medium
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.
Ben Roberts—Beyond the 'Networked Public Sphere': Politics, Participation and Technics in Web 2.0
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.
Ien Ang and Nayantara Pothen—Between Promise and Practice: Web 2.0, Intercultural Dialogue and Digital Scholarship
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
Ganaele Langlois, Fenwick McKelvey, Greg Elmer, and Kenneth Werbin—Mapping Commercial Web 2.0 Worlds: Towards a New Critical Ontogenesis
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, Titziana 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.
[TOP] |
