Media theorist Trebor Scholz has me convinced. Web 2.0 really is just a useless buzzword used to advertise the web. It says: “Look! Something shiny and new!” when in reality, the technology that is massively popular today has been around for a while before this Web 2.0 stage is said to have begun. A veil of uncertainty surrounds Web 2.0, as there is not even a definitive release date. Nobody really knows when it started.
In his essay entitled Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0, Trebor Scholz didn’t impress me entirely. I started disagreeing with Scholz halfway through the abstract. The idea that the branding of Web 2.0 limits the imagination of the future web is ridiculous. Toy Story 2 did not prevent Toy Story 3 from becoming a blockbuster. Unless I am misunderstanding his point, Scholz is way off the mark here. According to Scholz, Web 2.0 also limits media discourse. My jaw is on the floor. Is Scholz blind to the millions of discussions taking place on the web? Has he not seen countless conversations, arguments and idea sharing online? This blows me away.
Scholz makes clear that the widespread use of Web 2.0 technology is new, but the technology itself is not. In fact, technology was deemed to be Web 2.0 material after its release, instead of being designed to fit into the Web 2.0 environment. The creation of the term Web 2.0 is akin to changing the colour of a jellybean. The insides are the same as they were before, but now they are more flashy, popular and useful. The only purpose is for marketing.
The sites of Web 2.0 increase in value as the number of users increases. Scholz relates this to a telephone. If no-one else owns a telephone, it becomes worthless. Only with a network of users does the device have value. With more users, more information is entered into the network. According to Scholz, modern American youth care less for their online privacy than those in the past. This comparison holds no merit, because American children of past generations were not exposed to the web in its current form while growing up. How is it possible for kids today to care less than kids of the 60s about information online?
What is more, Scholz states that by sharing their info, users confide their “friends lists”, conversations and navigation habits with corporations on a daily basis. According to Scholz, this opens up “possibilities for total control” that are “barely imaginable today.” I’d love to hear some examples. Corporations are going to surround you in advertisements that have been selected based on the information you have provided to them. This is not a bad thing. This only means you’ll see more advertisements that you are interested in, and corporations will have more success in making the appropriate consumers aware of their products. If this is Scholz’s idea of total control, I would love to see how he fares in North Korea.
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