Web 2.0 video explanation…

I have already seen this video; but this might be the right place for me to put in my two-cents worth. There is no doubting that the media have been used cleverly to make a point; but the point leaves me cold, because I think something is missing. I have struggled to put my finger on just what is missing; and I have decided that it comes back to that question of identity and the way in which the discussion at

confused of calcutta broke down when the subtleties of the social side of the issue began to surface.

Like Erving Goffman I believe that much (if not all) of life in the "real world" is a matter of "the presentation of self;" and I further believe that, while the Web 2.0 world makes all sorts of claims to scaling that presentation of self from "face-to-face" to "virtual-face-to-virtual-face," the realization of those claims is highly impoverished, at least by Goffman's standards. While evangelists choose to address this by asking "will things get better," the philosopher in me prefers to ask if things can get better. My argument is that, at the end of the day, Web 2.0 is really just about a new generation of (pretty damned impressive) interfaces to what is little more than the same old databases; and, by their very nature, those databases can only live in a world of nouns and noun phrases. On the other hand presentation of self is a matter of performance, familiar enough to anyone in the performing arts but thoroughly alien to the world of databases, because the nature of performance resides in the world of verbs and verb phrases. Furthermore, that verb-based foundation is not one of state change but embraces the full scope of subtlety of tense, person, mood, and who-knows-what-else. (It also lies at the heart of the concept of "role," which is so fundamental to your current thinking, Lou!)

On my own blog I just wrote that I have finally been won over by Ségolène Royal (even if I cannot vote for her) after reading that she had said, "I'm today holding out my hand ... to all those who think that human values must always prevail over financial and market values." Web 2.0 may be pitching "human values;" but I do not think it is delivering them in any meaningful way. I fear that ultimately it will just maintain the status quo of the world the Internet has made, meaning that the warts in that world will just get more conspicuous, more inhuman, and more problematic!

@Stephen: Or maybe you're thinking too much :D

ZeMMs, it used to be said (before the media conglomerate bullies invaded the playground) that the job of the journalist was "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." I am not sure anyone has been "afflicted" by Web 2.0 yet; but there does seem to be an awful lot of smug comfort whenever one of these Expos convenes! Yes, if you think too much, you end up like the centipede that tries to figure out which leg to move next, never takes another step, and dies of hunger. On the other hand even the world of Web 2.0 is a world of consequences. (Ask Kathy Sierra.) I would hate to see us succumb to a level of comfort that dismisses any thought about those consequences! (I suppose that is why my own blog now now amassed 67 posts with the "consequences" tag!)

Stephen: You, as always, have an interesting view of things. My sense is, Expos or not, Web 2.0 is not an end to what the web can become. It is simply the next step in its evolution. New technologies will emerge, technologies will improve and as companies/sites try to emerge from the masses, they will adopt them to take a lead in their markets by providing more value and use to their users.

As for verbs, you have to wonder the entire initial challenge of the web of "maintaining state" has led us to where we are on the web today. Let's face, whether it is 1.0 or 2.0, the web is based in a transactional model (except for communication solutions for the most part), and with that it is challenge to have truly personal connections at the end nodes. Things will improve on that, perhaps Second Life is the first phase of it.

One has to ask though, is more personal information on the web a good thing? We need to excel in protecting ourselves and our information at as good or better rates than the advancements in the collaboration taking place on the web. But that is a whole topic in and of itself.

Lou, last week at the San Francisco ad:tech, I saw my first "Web 3.0" on a slide introducing the (rather gratuitous) "Content is King" panel; I am sure this was not the first declaration of Web 3.0 to a large public audience, even if no semantics were attached to the term!

Speaking of locutions such as "X #.#," I suspect that this whole fixation on maintaining state has at least some of its origins in the "culture of software releases," since each release is essentially the state of an executable file. In this case the transitions between the states are software development processes, which seem to run the entire gamut from black arts to mismanaged ineptitude. If one studies engineering to learn how to build artifacts that work, be they bridges, airplanes, or television sets, then "software engineering" may well be the greatest misnomer of the twentieth century!

There is an amusing edge of irony in the timing of your speculation about Second Life. Yesterday Daniel Terdiman posted an interesting

News blog item at CNET News.com concerning an open letter reflecting a growing wave of discontent in the Second Life community. One of the sources of discontent was "inventory loss," losing stuff and not being able to recover it when Second Life "upgrades" its software. Yes, Lou (and Virginia), Second Life developers seem to have a problem with maintaining state!

Personally, I like Giddens' phrase about the "uninterrupted flow of action." We do not have any problem with this in the physical world: All action ceases only with death (and, from a ecological point of view, it does not even cease then). However, when it comes to IT, we seem to refuse to have anything to do with that which cannot be interrupted and held in a frozen state. We have no problem understanding (or at least dealing with) things that pass us by in the physical world. Why do we deny them in the digital world? Why, in the case of identity, can I not be "what I am at the moment," without worrying about whether I am that way 24 hours (or less) from now?