The purpose of Web 2.0
10 November 2008 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | 2 comments
There were two New York Times articles posted today that I found interesting in themselves, but more interesting when considered together.
In the first one, Al Gore states, forget about "gee-whiz stuff," "Web 2.0 has to have a purpose."
"The purpose, I would urge all of you—as many of you as are willing to take it up—is to bring about a higher level of consciousness about our planet and the imminent danger and opportunity we face because of the radical transformation in the relationship between human beings and the Earth," Mr. Gore said Friday evening at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
While I have no desire to discuss a "higher level of consciousness about our planet," I do find it interesting that Al Gore wants to circumscribe the "purpose" of "Web 2.0" and that he dismisses so much of what actually accomplishes. This sentiment really hit me when I read the NYT article on how Obama "wondered if social networking, with its tremendous communication capabilities and aggressive database development, might help him beat the overwhelming odds facing him."
Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans.
Web 2.0 clearly has a purpose—communication. The question is not what the purpose is, but how to effectively use it. Something that Barack Obama clearly seems to grasp, but Al Gore?
Look at their websites (Barack Obama, Al Gore) and check out their Twitter accounts (Barack Obama, Al Gore). Who really gets the purpose of Web 2.0?
Jeffrey Barke is a front-end developer at The Knot
November 21st, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Well, there’s a use in the second case, too, namely to raise money. But you’re right that Obama starts out with the basic difference; we could go back to the useful model of ‘smooth’ vs. ‘striated’ spaces in _A Thousand Plateaus_ and remember that they feed into and spark off of one another. Smooth spaces (communicative networks, for example) will always make room for secondary usages which re-channel the original purpose(lessness)– actually, they couldn’t be maintained otherwise. But Gore starts out withs striation, which shuts everything down from the beginning: that’s the problem with ’causes,’ sometimes. (It’s not so clear that Gore is such an ecological hero — carbon trading as a solution, etc.).
November 25th, 2008 at 12:02 am
Thanks for commenting, Kelly, and thanks for the reference to A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari's model of "smooth" vs. "striated" spaces is exactly what I was trying to hint at, but you phrased it much more succinctly than I did. It's been too long since I read any D & G!
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