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September 27, 2005
I've always thought the old talk about the global village was a bit suss.
 In postmodernity creating a global village means that everything and everyone is online all the time. The implication is that geography (place) no longer matters.
Now we do live in a network society. Though I'm online most of the time I don't live in the global village as such.
I live in Adelaide and Canberra--spaces that some call local in contrast to global, but which I understand as particular places. We do need to break out of the old global village model favoured by the cosmopolitans.
In commenting on the Web2 conference Zephoria over at apophenia says it well:
On an economic level, globalization has both positive and negative implications. But on a personal level, no one actually wants to live in a global village. You can't actually be emotionally connected to everyone in the world. While the global village provides innumerable resources and the possibility to connect to anyone, people narrow their attention to only focus on the things that matter. What matters is conceptually "local." In business, the local part of glocalization mostly refers to geography. Yet, the critical "local" in digital glocalization concerns culture and social networks. You care about the people that are like you and the cultural elements that resonate with you. In the most extreme sense, the local is simply you alone. There is certain a geographical component to the local because the people in your region probably share more cultural factors with you and are more likely connected to you in network terms, but this is not a given. In fact, the folks who were most geographically alienated were the first on the digital bandwagon ---they wanted the global so that they could find others like them regardless of physical location.
Glocalization is such an ugly world. I much prefer place. I never understood the local as being alone. Place is the regional.
What then is Web2? What does it signify?
William Blaze at Abstract Dynamics has a go. He says Web2 refers to a
"... real feeling among some that there is something going on that makes the web of today different then the web of a few years ago. Blogs, open standards, long tails and the like... Which of course doesn't sound that different then say the goes of the plain old unnumbered "web", back ten years ago. But the Web 2.0 are right, the web is different now....What really separates the "Web 2.0" from the "web" is the professionalism, the striation between the insiders and the users. When the web first started any motivated individual with an internet connection could join in the building. HTML took an hour or two to learn, and anyone could build. In the Web 2.0 they don't talk about anyone building sites, they talk about anyone publishing content. What's left unsaid is that when doing so they'll probably be using someone else's software. Blogger, TypePad, or if they are bit more technical maybe WordPress or Movable Type. It might be getting easier to publish, but its getting harder and harder to build the publishing tools. What's emerging is a power relationship, the insiders who build the technology and the outsiders who just use it.
Well that's right. This weblog depends on professional support. I had no choice. It was a necessity. William mentions another difference. He says that 'the world of RSS feeds, abundant APIs and open source code really is a major departure from the "own and control" approaches of an earlier generation of companies [Microsoft] and something I'm personally in favor of.' However, he quickly qualifies this. He adds:
Privilege is what the Web 2.0 is really about. What separates the Web 2.0 from that plain old "web" is the establishment and entrenchment of a hierarchy of power and control. This is not the same control that Microsoft, AOL and other closed system / walled garden companies tried unsuccessfully to push upon internet users. Power in the Web 2.0 comes not from controlling the whole system, but in controlling the connections in a larger network of systems. It is the power of those who create not open systems, but semi-open systems, the power of API writers, network builders and standards definers.
This is the networked world of Amazon, Ebay and Google.
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I think he is upset that the web grew beyond techies. What he calls the "web" had techies and geeks posting HTML based websites. Those same techies then produced the software for modern day blogs. HTML was a pain in the arse to maintain. I tried running multiple sites as HTML, and then later XML. It just sucks. That included the afc site which had close to static 500 pages. Dynamic sites like scoop, wordpress, blogspot etc etc are just a million times easier. He is forgetting that techies wrote those systems for themselves, and then realised they were highly usable - and saleable.
I disagree with his claim of web 2.0 being about semi-openness. He is forgetting that Google is only seven years old. I can recall when HotBot was the hottest thing around. The barriers to entry are so low, and the market so large that it will probably go through constant reinvention. Ten years ago I was using Trumpet Winsock, now, my iBook connects to a wireless network and I dont have to worry about dialing, or configuration.
Another decade from now there will be some other explosion, change, or whatever. Google will probably still be a player simply because of all the money they have tucked away. Same as Microsoft is still player despite not having an innovative hit since Win98. They have money.
But the internet is volatile, and its users fickle. I expect I wont be able to recognize or predict how I interact with the internet ten years from now.