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Is Web 2.0 the Advent of the Post-Modern Internet?
jg21 writes "Web 2.0 Journal has an essay on 'The Post-Modern Rhetoric of High Technology' in which the author contends that Web 2.0 is nothing less than 'the advent of the Post-Modern Internet. Will Web 2.0 be a revolution or a mere rebellion?" From the article: "Web 2.0 can take two distinct directions, and it is perhaps the rhetoric of it all that will define the path. Web 2.0 can be the French Revolution of Technology or it can be the American Revolution of Technology. Joseph Schumpeter's winds of creative destruction are blowing especially hard in the Internet technology world today, with remarkable improvements to our daily lives. But these winds can blow too hard too often, and an even older economic law, the Law of Diminishing Returns, begins to take over. Our wild-eyed radical phase must ultimately give way to some replacement. We cannot permanently be the rebels."
1) What is the author's take on the idea that critical distance and the potential for real objectivity are unattainable? This question can be seen at work in both Haraway's comments (see below) about what she sees as Jameson's main thesis on postmodernism, and in Laclau's mapping of an "analytic terrain" where the "given" is no longer a viable myth. Pejoratively put, this collapse of critical distance is decried as "aestheticist" or as aestheticizing ideology in many discussions (Norris). The usual implication is that the culprits are decadent, apolitical and dangerously irrational. The historical antecedents referred to are often Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde's "dandyism" and the "Art for Art's sake" movement. Whereas for many differently oriented commentators those same decriers of aestheticism are often themselves denounced as totalitarian rationalists, modernists, "mere" moralizers, reactionaries and unsophisticated know-nothings (Haraway; Giroux).
2) The terms postmodern, postmodernity and postmodernism can be seen to associate or conjure different meanings: the term postmodern is inclusively ambiguous of what people mean when they talk about issues that come up in discussions of postmodernity and postmodernism. Postmodernity is a sign for contemporary society, for the stage of technological and economic organization which our society has reached. Postmodernism then can be, as Eco says, a "spiritual" category rather than a discrete period in history; a "style" in the arts and in culture indebted to ironic and parodic pastiche as well as to a sense of history now seen less as a story of lineal progression and triumph than as a story of recurring cycles.
Analogously, and only for purposes of illustration, the condition of modernity is often spoken of as the rapid pace and texture of life in a society experienced as the result of the industrial revolution (Berman). However, modern_ism_ is a movement in culture and the arts usually identified as a period and style beginning with impressionism as a break with Realism in the fine arts and in literature. Prior to modernism one finds periods and styles associated with other distinct aesthetic movements, e.g., Romanticism and Realism. For instance, both Blake and Balzac, Romantic and Realist representatives respectively, could be said to have had some experience of modernity, to have lived during the early stages of the expansion of bourgeois or industrial capitalism and technology and science, whereas no one thinks of their respective arts or modes of expression as obviously "modernist."
A series of buzzwords.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Wow. So nuclear science is "post-modern".
No. This is another is the series of crap articles which claim that X is "post modern" because saying so makes you sound cooler and more educated than everyone else.
If you cannot define something, you do not understand it. But feel free to claim that technologies are "post modern" because it masks the fact that you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
Beside, when you get paid by the word, you really need something that you can pull a lot of words out of.
Didn't we get rid of Jon Katz years ago? Who invited him back?
Fair comment. People want stuff to work and with mapquest no longer working witn windows 98 because of this (even with the latest Opera) one is forced to believe he cure is worse than the disease.
Flashy is good. Working is better.
Hopefully in the next 10 years they'll get the bugs out.
Need Mercedes parts ?
...the New-Age Technological Philosopher. One who can pose abstract theories about the state of technology on their blog and have it linked to on major sites across the globe.
Now if I could just find one worth reading.
Translation:
The appearance of the "Web 2.0" jargon is a strong candidate for being the moment when the Internet jumped the shark.
What, oh, what will society do without a back button? This is possibly the most vapid article I've read in months. The analogy is weak and no attempt is made to develop it. The author has little comprehension of what the term "postmodernism" ever meant, even if it ever meant anything, apologies Jean-François Lyotard. Doesn't Zonk have something better to do with his time besides posting this kind of tripe? Oh, wait. I must be new here.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
mapquest never works. unless you want to find every closed road and construction site between where you are and your destination. for that it works great
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Oh, ridiculous.
First, postmodern means something different in different disciplines. In Literature and Film, it tends to be about breaking things apart into lots of little pieces and then doing critical analyses that pretend to be meaningful but aren't. (Actually, I think we're getting to a post-post-modern phase, where the tools of post-modernity are being used in a non-post-modern way. Garden State was a good example of this--it felt very post-modern, but it wasn't really post-modern.)
Second, the article exerpt (I didn't read the RTFA) says "Web 2.0 is slowing down, possibly a sign of it's reaching maturity. The boom is over!" Using bigger and more annoying words. I'm sorry, but the use of bigger and more annoying words makes me immediately think it's really stupid--not because of the presence of big words, but because of the ratio of syllables to content.
Third, Web 2.0 was more about integration and user-generated content than it was about... hmmm... well, okay, `integration of user-generated content' could take a hint of a stab at claiming to be something postmodern--but honestly, the content is too uniform to be postmodern. Ten million kids whining about their school day...
Hey, that does sound kind of postmodern. But they have to do it at the same time, wearing glaring colors. And maybe there should be a tuba?
I wonder if I can post that thought in a journal? I'll need to add more words... and colors. But they'll give me a Ph.D. Hmm...
An evil journal...
Our wild-eyed radical phase must ultimately give way to some replacement. We cannot permanently be the rebels.
What on Earth is he talking about?
Enlightenment thinking was clear and organized. There were disagreements amongst the thinkers of the Era, but the Era itself was definable.
So he says, but is unable to recognize it's principles as they are applied to software freedom. There's a straight line between the US Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the "rhetoric" of the internet liberating electronic expression from Government control. Business and economic success are simple byproduct of freedom. We can and must all be rebels so long as others would tax and control us without consent. Making money off the result is secondary.
The name calling is more understandable if he's forcasting the next big company caused IT meltdown. The so called "bursting of the internet bubble" was a direct result of bad laws which allowed public resources to be stolen by the likes of Bellsouth. The laws which allowed them to crush the DSL companies were bought with the promise of shiny fiber to the curb networks which were charged for but never appeared. Other companies, Netscape etc, were crushed in much the same way. As the next set of shitty laws are passed in the name of fighting terrorism and big dumb executives gloat at their expected revenues, I suppose it's time to crank up the "wild eyed rebel propaganda." It would not do to crush "small business innovators" and "mom and pop shops" now would it?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Post-Modernism has a perfectly clear definition that makes perfect sense. It is, however, too stupid for any words in any language, except maybe Klingon.
I have freaks! I did something right...
"Chief Strategy Officer"
And what idiot lists his "campus council" work in his bio once he's gotten his first job?
And for the ultimate humiliation
Someone thinks pretty highly of themselves and their place in the world.
News flash; Code and end user interfaces will always change.
The biggest news flash would be if they actually changed for the better.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I'd have to run a new cable connection to the Internet version 2.0.
According to Wikipedia, "Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004[citation needed], refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies that let people collaborate and share information online in previously unavailable ways. O'Reilly Media, in collaboration with MediaLive International, used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences and since 2004 it has become a popular (though ill-defined and often criticized) buzzword amongst certain technical and marketing communities."
Ill-defined hardly describes it. If it's that nebulous, don't bother me with it, especially if it's from that guy on Fox or some marketing dweebs.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Anyway, I think the idea is that DHMTL is to HTML what pomoismo is to the merely modern, to wit, New-n-Improved! More whizz for your bang! and all that.
That's really funny!
The thing is that "postmodern" has a "definition" in art and philosophy the same as the musical genres "rock", "techno", "trance" and "rap" have definitions in music. And they're just as useless when describing technology. We know that "Web 2.0" cannot be "classic rock" because that was created years ago. But it cannot be "new wave" because that is almost as old. "Industrial" has come and gone so that was probably "Web 1.5". Rap is hot right now. Or is it hip-hop? No. "Web 2.0" is definitely "Celtic Fusion Invasion". And now I'll write an article saying that it is.
Web sites can be viewed as "art". But the technology is just technology. Paint brushes were used in "Classical" and "Romantic" and "Postmodern" art. Yet no one is claiming that paint brushes or canvases are "art 2.0" or "Postmodern".
Do websites have a "philosophy"? Is that philosophy shared amongst all Ajax-based sites? No. Ajax is the technology. Technology is not a philosophy.
And so forth.
From his bio
"Skinner Layne is Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of NeXplore Technologies, Inc., a Web 2.0 Social Computing company based in Frisco, Texas."
See? He's the CSO of a company that he co-founded. A Web 2.0 Social Computing company, if you must know.
A Web 2.0 Social Computing company that doesn't have its web page listed in Google's search. Which only returns 24 hits anyway.
Does being paid $5 by Mom to babysit your younger brother count as a "first job"?
But aside from that, I don't think Foucault would approve of the Internet. He'd probably classify it as an architecture of surveillance, like the school or the factory. Can't say that he'd be completely wrong about that, either.
Mark Poster wrote an interesting book called the The mode of information in which he tried to link Foucault and some other pomo figures to the emergent forms of info-tech (c.1990). I think he was trying to connect Foucault to data bases. I didn't quite get it then, and it probably makes even less sense now, but it was still an interesting read. I've always meant to go back to it.
And no, pomo cannot be summarised as "think outside the box." It's more like "the box's interiority is always already circumscribed by the trace of its exteriority."
Well, all correct and consistant theories if you get down to "nuts and bolts stuff" nest themselves in safe defensive positions where you can't prove or disprove anything, otherwise they'd either be incorrect or inconsistant. I think postmodernism is a natural evolution into trying to explore these areas, and this is where I agree with your string theory analogy -- it's elegant in a sort of masturbatory way to the people doing it, but many academics would agree that neither are worth the expenditure of time or manpower that they've taken.
The difference is in the public at large, at least with the people who have a vague notion of what postmodernism is (though I'm not sure there's any other kind of notion). Most people trust string theory because they trust physicists. You can read a physics journal and have no idea where to start without years of specialized training in just the symbology, so there's not much choice. You can sit down with a paper on postmodernism and a handy dictionary and puzzle out that they're saying, and one time is enough for most people to decide it's not worth their time.
I'm a theoretical mathematician in training, so I obviously think there's a use in the world for abstraction that doesn't present an immediate use. I don't have a problem with at least a handful of people out there in the world pondering postmodernism carefully. I just begin to wonder how much effort is spent along that line.
...have my secretary deconstruct the article and send me an executive summary of said deconstruction, so I can ignore it later.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Actually, the entire article was written just so you would read the summary and say that, as a demonstration of post-structuralist patterns of deterministic choice. Way to go, Captain Suggestable.
I have freaks! I did something right...
Web 2.0 can take two distinct directions [...]
Back button and forward button?
Upstream and downstream?
Bears and bulls?
I'm sorry, I give up: I can't figure out from the verbiage that follows that statement what those two directions are. Perhaps that particular kind of English major that this guy represents should not write about technology.
I do believe they meant post "m-o-d-e-m", since most pages on the "2.0" Internets now require enough bandwidth to make those stubborn "I'll never leave leave my beloved dial-up!" (Most of us know someone like this) users switch to Cable or DSL! Oh, and before you argue - there is no such thing as a "cable modem" or "DSL modem" - those are really bridges or routers.
Boy, I hear your music.
I'm getting just sick and tired of hearing about "Web 2.0" as if there were *any* advance or defining characteristic thereto. So far, all I've seen of "Web 2.0" is some incremental advances in the quality and utility of websites using javascript. Neat and fast, but also easily done using "1.0" technologies such as flash or java.
So, it's somewhat faster - wow! This is going to change the world!!!??!?
This is a slew of buzzwords looking for meaning. Asking about Web 2.0 is like asking about god - ask 10 different people, and you'll get 10 different answers!
1998 called - and they want their meaningless hype back. Call me when there's some substance!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The Web 2.0 revolution will not be televised!
Last I checked, Web 2.0 was AJAX, which was a way of making a medium that was originally mean to be static, less static. I feel it's more akin to compiling a bunch of photos into a flipbook rather than the actual creation of a TV.
Sure, javascript will do your dishes for you now, but it's not really anything new. I mean, back when javascript was livescript, or actionscript, or somethingscript, and Java was a seed planted in someone's head, there existed things call programs that could *still* communicate over the interweb. Did they do it over web page? No, but I'm still not sure why having it display in a web browser makes sense. Does the back button taken the place of undo? If I hit reload will my essay get better?
If you *really* want to credit apps in web pages, I think Java and M$ should get the prize. Java, with the whole language that could run an app anyhwere, and M$ with OLE/COM/DCOM/ActiveX/VirusCom. The whole excel spreadsheet in a web page, once again, didn't ever especially appeal to me. If I wanted to edit something on a remote server I would much rather: (a) access the remote file system with something like NFS, or (b) run the actual application remotely (ala X Window). And no, windows remote desktop is not the same.
So why the Web 2.0 crazyness? My suspicion is: (a) it's easy to start (though I would argue not to finish) an interface, (b) no need to compile anything, download anything, etc. (c) automatic file sharing (i.e. the whole internet thing again).
Java's success has been mixed. I don't think many people would argue that when it was first released, the press it received was overblown. The AWT, IMHO, leaves much to desire. While Swing did come along and resolve some of the issues, compare to a full featured toolkit like Cocoa, and I think it's still hard to compare. But it does provide one thing that no other toolkit does: a cross-platform app without major licensing issues or recompilation (I'm sure someone is going to complain that I fail to mention Tcl/Tk).
Google opening up their APIs to third party apps might actually for once and all start to solve these issues. You can access your data from any computer, you don't need to install anything (AJAX interface), but you can use a more sophisticated interface if needed.
Though I would love if someone actually made a cross-platform VM that had a GUI on the same level as Coca, but easily allowed any language to compile for it (yes, I know, you can compile any language for the Java VM with the GNU toolkit [e.g. gcj]).
Oh, and before you argue - there is no such thing as a "cable modem" or "DSL modem" - those are really bridges or routers.
... oh, wait.
Yeah, you're right. DSL and Cable modems only MOdulate and DEModulate analog carrier signals to encode/decode digital information. That's completely different from a MODEM , which MOdulates and DEModulates an analog carrier signal to
Sweet Jesus, I thought web 2.0 was a useless enough term... now it's being described as post-modern. What's next? Pics of Linus Torvalds in technicolor ala Andy Warhol? Maybe we could enter into a deconstructionist movement and port the entire 'net over to run on an Altair 8800?
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Are they kidding or are these people stupid ?
What you call web 2.0 is just a way of making client side do a little more work when serving web pages, and pretty widgets. Thats it.
Apparently to some metaphors and analogies are too cheap to spend them in that vulgar manner. French revolution - check out the immense exagerration here.
Read radical news here
My own interpretation of "Web 2.0," (although I usually hate such buzzphrases) is that it describes a type of website which utilises what I could describe as "swarming collaboration." This is something very strikingly demonstrated by digg's Swarm visualisation.
To me this is the single main characteristic of sites described by that term, though...Sites that have completely peer to peer or submitted contact which is either exchanged or cross-pollinated between users at extremely high speeds. It's extremely group-oriented in nature...these sites are multi-user by definition; they can't exist with only one person using them at once, because they rely on users to provide the actual content.
Are they a good thing? For communication and collaborative problem solving, certainly...but there have been a number of times when browsing digg in particular, when I've developed a headache and have begun to feel severely overwhelmed...there is just *so much* data constantly flying around.
People have talked about digg being preferable to Slashdot, but I believe they both have their place. I can't cognitively tolerate digg for more than short periods; like I said, it's simply too much. Slashdot on the other hand allows me to pace the rate at which data comes to me; Articles are long enough that they can be read one at a time without there being more on the screen...and despite the idiotic "humour" which is present here at times, there is still a lot more substance and insight in the topics here than I've seen on digg so far.
Although this maybe applies to TFA, I beg to differ on your general point. There are plenty of words and concepts which you understand and use perfectly but are incapable of "defining". Words like "Ethics", "Justice", "Religion" and "Morals" are important in our language and in our everyday behavior, but most would be pressed if asked to "define" them. The early Socratic dialogues of Plato (in which such a definition for such concepts was sought in vain) only illustrate this point. The same goes for almost any philosophical movement, not just postmodernism. It's hard to define what "Hegelianism" or even "Logical Positivism" is. The case of postmodernism is special only because its disciples say upfront that they shun any definition of their occupation. But again, this does not mean they do nothing, say nothing, or mean nothing. It may be the case that they do, but you are in no position to judge, just because they shunned a holy "definition".
On the other hand, I do know one thinker who would agree with your exact wordings of the demand for definition, and that would be Leibniz. His ideal was indeed that every concept would have an exact, almost mathematical definition. When in dispute, we would simply say "let us calculate", and resolve any conflicts by analyzing the definitions of concepts. Which could have simplified a lot of Slashdot. But even Leibniz was more pragmatic than that in real life, you know.
I don't want to stretch this discussion much further, but I agree with all of your points. Nonetheless:
No doubt the article's statements "Post-modernism cannot be defined except by saying what it is not. It is not modern; it is what came after the Enlightenment" is outright ridiculous.
However, my point was not to argue that a definition for justice CAN'T be given (by Nozick or Rawls or others); The mere fact that we ARGUE about it, means we have some understanding of it prior to trying to define it ("explication" is the technical philosophical term, I believe). My point was that in our everyday life, me, you and lots of others use and understand words which WE can't define, even some remote expert may try to provide a definition for them. I know many religious people who use the word "Religion" perfectly well althuogh THEY would be pressed if asked for definition, and may even argue it can't be given IN PRINCIPLE. The idea that if you can't define something you don't understand it, or that if something can't (in principle) be defined it's bogus, seems to me like typical fallacious "slashdotism" which occurs in many +5 insightful comments I read here.
As regards to Hobbes, it's a whole different issue, because of his nominalism: his thesis that because definitions are given by us arbitrarily, and because all truths depend on definitions, truths are arbitrary. This thesis is in fact a precedent to current postmodernist thought.
There is a big difference between being against change and being against marketing buzzspeak.
If you read the authors comment (and most around those lines here), you will see what we hate is not the change, but the false labels associated to it.
WTF is "Web 2.0"? It's nothing. Everything going on today has been done before, its nothing new, it's just buzzwords.
People point to MySpace and YouTube, and I point to Geocities and Shoutcast. Only difference between the two is that we have more hardware and bandwidth today so we can deliver richer content (richer interface for developing personal pages, richer media - video vs. audio) - there is nothing *fundamentally* new or revolutionary about most of the web now compared to the web 5 years ago. Sure, there are some bright spots, like Google Maps/GMail/Flickr. But these things emerged gradually - some have been around in one form or another since the 90s. You can't just pick some point in time and go "Oh, it's web 2.0 now".
It's just marketspeak. And we hate marketspeak cause it is meaningless.