The Technology and Culture of Web 2.0
By Barry Schaeffer and Bruce Nevin
Background
Of the many subjects percolating through today’s information universe, few have received more attention
than the mix of technology and culture known as Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 is perhaps not the most dramatic expression of technological breakthrough we have seen—
indeed, as we shall see later, much of its technology foundation is evolutionary rather than new.
Nonetheless, Web 2.0 is uniquely important because it represents perhaps the first time we have seen
culture and technology impact one another in real time with little or no latency. This dramatically higher
level of immediacy in Web 2.0’s design and reality has engendered a number of forces that appear, and in
fact may be, revolutionary in their nature and impact. Indeed, the blogoshpere has crackled with
statements about Web 2.0, at one extreme hailing it as harbinger of a new “democratic information
world1”, while at the other condemning it as “false”, “disaster”, and “societal suicide.” While it is likely
none of these, Web 2.0 raises a number of issues for which there is little precedent, and as such, is worthy
of a close look from all sides.
Like few developments before it, Web 2.0 has grown from a series of intersections between cultural and
technological evolution. It will likely be adopted along lines dictated by these two dimensions, impacting
society as much in one as the other. In this article, we attempt to address a number of questions about
Web 2.0, organized roughly into three areas;
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Why is there a Web 2.0 and what trends in our culture have generated the perception that change is
needed in the way the Web functions?
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What is Web 2.0 and what is it not? How is Web 2.0 different from earlier incarnations of the Web,
and what technology and cultural factors are integral to its architecture and operation?
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What will Web 2.0 and its successors (Web 3.0 is already being discussed) mean for the culture
that created it?
While no single article can hope to fully illuminate these areas, we hope to provide readers with a frame
of reference by which the Web 2.0 phenomenon may be measured, evaluated and, if we are attentive,
managed.
Technology and Culture; a Changing Balance
If society has displayed one enduring characteristic during the past several millennia, it is the interaction
and mutual impact of culture and technology: how we live, how we imagine, create, and adopt new
technology; and how we are, in turn, changed by it. The recent description of a growing “continuous
partial attention” 2 phenomenon among frequent users of instantaneous communications provides at least
anecdotal evidence that how we use technology is as important as the technology itself. While much has
been written about culture and technology separately, the more subtle aspects of their interaction have
often escaped our attention. Perhaps the inattention is because until relatively recently those mutual
interactions have been offset by long periods of time, sometimes centuries, between (1) desire and
perceived need, (2) development of technology responsive to the need, and, once it has been adopted,
(3) its cultural impact. For instance, the printing revolution usually associated with Gutenberg in the midfifteenth century, actually had its roots nearly 1,200 years before with invention the Codex or edge-sewn
book3. It then continued for another several centuries after Gutenberg as the potential for mass availability
1
http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html
https://continuouspartialattention.jot.com/WikiHome
3
http://www.answers.com/topic/codex?cat=entertainment
2
of reading material impacted society’s educational and governance systems. Reading material changed
from a focus on education for the religious and royal elite to education—and empowerment—for the
masses. With centuries between cause and effect, these interactions, however concrete, were easy to miss.
With the passage of time, however, the pace of this cultural/technological interaction has quickened,
making the perceived need, realization, and impact more contemporaneous and easily discernible—and
arguably more important. A young United States’ desire for respect in a world dominated by the navies
and privateers of the European powers, for example, drove a Philadelphia naval architect’s development
of a radical improvement in warship design4 in the 1790s, having a material effect less than 15 years later
on the outcome of the war of 1812 and the rise of the new nation as a global power. This compression of
time between need/desire, development, and impact has continued apace until today, the process is often
measured in months, a few years at most.
Typically, the individuals and groups responsible for technological development have focused on what
the technology could be made to do, leaving the ultimate uses and impact of that technology to others. In
some cases, this neglect has created a dramatic level of myopia that, although not intentional, has had farreaching effect on society. Ray Tomlinson, the developer of email in the early 1970s, failed to anticipate
the rise and growth of spam,5 admitting that his focus was on the roughly 1,000 users of the systems on
which he was working even though it is arguable that the signs and roots of spam were present even then
in the broader society. Packet-switched networking had been described several years before and junk
“mail” was already a problem, for both postal and telephone media. As we live with the results of these
early failures to anticipate and deal with writing on the wall, we must confront the question, with the same
level of development now requiring scarcely three years, whether we can afford to ignore the impacts
inherent in today’s developments, including Web 2.0.
To do that, we must first grasp just what is, and is not, part of Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 Technologies
The term “Web 2.0” suggests a new release, a significant advance introducing new features and
capabilities on the web all at once, but the analogy of a major release of a software or hardware product is
misleading. It is more of a conceptual shift of emphasis, a recognition of changes that have been emerging
over time in the uses of web capabilities which, to a surprising extent, are not new.
From a technological standpoint, it might better be called Web 1.2. Many of the technologies that support
Web 2.0 have in fact been part of the web since its beginning, and salient usage features of Web 2.0 have
long been common web practice. Beginning with XHTML and HTML markup that is semantically more
informative, and CSS further separating content from presentation (and support for XML/XSL coming
“real soon”), the evolutionary advances in technology that support Web 2.0 include improvements in
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4
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Server software
Web syndication (a form of publication by making parts of a website available for use on other
websites) with “web feeds” using RSS or Atom
Protocols for instant messaging, such as XMPP, and software for social networking, such as
FOAF and XFN.
SOAP to send messages and instructions for servers, and other protocols for web APIs to
exchange XML or JSON payloads
Network architecture principles such as REST to support transparent machine-to-machine
interactions
Plugins and extensions for standards-compliant (or standards-oriented) browsers
Mechanisms for users to annotate content with comments or metadata tags, sometimes
elaborating them into folksonomies, as with del.icio.us
Systems for combining content from different sources into mashups
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_original_United_States_frigates
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3525110.ece
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Tools for creating and publishing content in blogs (weblogs), wikis, and forums
Internet storage systems, as seen in the vast storage capacity provided by Google
Web 2.0 has much in common with the open source movement in software development, and indeed we
might say that Web 2.0 is the extension of motivations and organizing concepts from the open source
development world to a more general population, riding on open source tools, such as wikis. Any
technology that fosters the creativity and collaboration of volunteer participants on the web—the keynote
of both open source and Web 2.0—can be called Web 2.0 technology.
From a user perspective, content is king on the web, and always has been. Now the power of dynamic
content is emerging. The focus is now on participation, beyond simply publishing your content on the
web. Web 2.0 technology establishes spaces on the web where users collaborate to share, modify, and
recombine content, adding value by doing so. This is not to say that publishing one’s content has ceased.
One of the remarkable consequences is the emergence of the ‘blogosphere’, in which previously
unheralded people compete with and in many cases become more influential than professional journalists
and pundits in reporting and
evaluating news. Blogs thrive on
readers’ collaborative comment and
cross-talk in ways that letters to the
editor never could.
In these collaboration spaces created
and enabled by Web technologies,
communities of interest emerge, so
that users with quirky minority and
niche interests more easily find their
fellow birds of a feather—the hitherto
neglected 20 percent (or less) of the
80-20 rule, the “long tail”6 that
enables web-based business models
exemplified by Amazon.com, eBay,
and Craigslist. As the established
success of these business models
indicates, this trend is not really new.
It is an acceleration of existing trends
and an extension of them to broader
populations. Satisfying the user has
always been the problem. One key to
their success is in making the
collective intelligence of those populations part of the solution. Increasingly, technology supports these
trends.
Tim O’Reilly did much to clarify the term Web 2.0 from a business model perspective at a 2004
conference. A brainstorming session produced the preliminary “meme map”7 reproduced here, which very
conveniently provides us a succinct summary of these ideas.
Is Web 2.0 only a change of perspective, an epiphany by builders of business models, with no significant
technological developments to mark it? No, hardly. But of those technologies that enable collaboration,
sharing, spontaneous creativity, and all the rest of it, no single innovation can stand up and declare itself
to be the change that constitutes Web 2.0. The nearest contender to that title might be RSS, “the most
significant advance in the fundamental architecture of the web since early hackers realized that CGI could
be used to create database-backed websites” according to Tim O’Reilley.8 “RSS allows someone [not
6
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
8
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=3#designpatterns
7
only] to link … to a page, but to subscribe to it, with notification every time that page changes.” But
that’s only one part of the picture.
In Web 1.0, applications run either on the user's client desktop or on the server, but now Web 2.0
“network as platform” applications run in the user's browser. In Web 1.0, the browser is only a tool for
the user to view someone else’s content on a website, but now the user may own the data on a website and
control it through the browser. The site's "architecture of participation" may enable the user to add value
in the course of using it. A site's user interface may use rich media such as Ajax (Asynchronous
JavaScript and XML) or Adobe Flex (based on flash) to emulate a desktop application. These
technologies improve interactive performance, a critical aspect of usability, by updating in the browser
only what has changed on the site, instead of reloading an entire web page, so that the user sees his or her
changes to the content with a minimum of process lag.
Web 2.0 applications make much heavier demands on database and workflow systems in the back end
than in the past, and correspondingly the browser must be given more client-side muscle lest server access
issues obtrude on the user interaction. Beyond traditional HTML forms, these demands require intensive
use of JavaScript (and Ajax) scripting, and programming with Flash, Java applets, and other like
technologies. This shift has some pretty profound business consequences, but to talk about those we must
first review some of the background.
Earlier, we suggested that open source has some parallels to Web 2.0. Open source has deep roots. The
protocols that enable the Internet were developed in the 1960s by a collaborative process called Request
for Comment (RFC). The freely distributed GNU operating system 9 was the original motivation and
focus of the Free Software Foundation, beginning in 1983. The concept of open vs. closed (proprietary)
source code was thus well established when Netscape released Navigator code and called it open source;
which became Mozilla, the open source browser family. Tim O’Reilley organized the Open Source
Summit in 1998. Since then, the open source movement has greatly expanded, the reliability and worth of
open source software has been amply demonstrated, and it is now an integral part of the production and
delivery of products in many enterprises. Open source tools like Mozilla, Linux, and Apache have
achieved impressive market share, a stunning success for the movement. The EU has come out more and
more strongly in favor of open source.10
At this point, the plot thickens. Actually, the plot has been thick and cloudy for years. The adversarial
relationship alluded to above in the history of Netscape and Mozilla persists in the experience of Linux
and of open source software in general, due to a profound mismatch of business philosophy and practices.
As its response to the business imperatives of Web 2.0, and while still sustaining the public message that
they are “making the PC the place where it all comes together” (Bill Gates in a 2007 interview on CNN
about Vista11), Microsoft is nonetheless moving strongly into “cloud computing”. What does that mean?
Cloud computing moves software applications and services from PCs to centralized data centers, where
they are made available by Internet connectivity. The computing centers that are being built out by dozens
of companies like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce will effectively outsource data processing as a
commodity like electricity. Phenomena like Google applications directly challenge the traditional model
of packaged desktop software in the enterprise and in the home.
On Tuesday, April 22, 2008, Microsoft announced its entry into cloud computing, a data storage and Web
software system, called Live Mesh, which delivers services to an expanding range of electronic gadgets.
In a “Services and Strategies” document, quoted in the New York Times the next day, CTO Ray Ozzie
articulated three “guiding principles,” the first of which is “The Web is the hub of our social mesh and our
device mesh.” But the foundation for this move was in place three years earlier. The familiar dozen Office
tools (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and so on) have been transformed to use an XML-based file format
This facetiously recursive acronym stands for “GNU’s Not UNIX” because it contains no UNIX code, only free
software.
10
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/technology/11soft.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin
11
http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/30/technology/gates/index.htm
9
called Office Open XML (OOXML). OOXML reportedly was rushed through the standards process
(stronger words have been used for this experience, such as “brutal and corrupt”12) so as to compete with
the already existing ISO OpenDocument standard from the open source community. Competing browsers
then—competing standards now.
How does this relate to cloud computing? With Internet Information Services (IIS), SharePoint, and other
cloud products, Microsoft has integrated these XML-based Web services so that Office applications can
easily interchange data with back-end systems. Office is thus transformed to a development platform and
a front-end portal for user interactions with CRM, ERP, and other back-end systems in the cloud—or the
“mesh,” to use the Microsoft term. (At the time of the product announcement in 2005, this role was laid
out in an interview with Steven Sinofsky, SVP for the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group at
Microsoft. Sinofsky was previously in charge of development for Microsoft Office, a career development
that mirrors the transformation of Office software from desktop to cloud.13) On this platform, Microsoft
aims to support users on a continuum from traditional users who prefer a desktop environment (only now
it might be invisibly interacting with cloud resources); to those comfortable with dynamic web tools
delivering remote services, to those who fully embrace the new conception of portals interacting with
resources in the cloud. Either way, Microsoft wants the data and processes in the cloud to come to the
user through a spigot with their brand—and their use fees. In “What is Web 2.0,” Tim O’Reilley said
“Unless a vendor can control both ends of every interaction, the possibilities of user lock-in via software
APIs are limited.”14 At the time, that seemed an optimistic statement; it may turn out to be prescient.
A populist spirit is pervasive in Web 2.0, the open source movement, indeed in “Web 1.0” and (as the
governments of China and Burma appear to agree) in the Internet itself, championed by organizations like
the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In the Web 2.0 open source world,
the cry is up to resist OOXML as a grab for control of crucial APIs for cloud computing. Paranoia, or
justified concern? In true Web 2.0 form, we leave that to our readers to decide.
What will Web 2.0 Mean for Information Developers?
As Web 2.0 becomes more pervasive within the corporate intranet, how will it affect the
development of technical information? For engineering organizations, Web 2.0 opens barriers in
two directions:
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Outward facing toward customers and partners
Inward facing toward information developers for technical documentation, training,
support, sales support, and marketing
As a business deploys Web 2.0 technologies, its customers and prospective customers can have
greater influence on product roadmaps and even current design and development processes.
“Customer feedback” has always been a desideratum, but a feedback form at the back of the
book seems a positive barrier to communication when compared to the interactivity of Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 spells the eventual demise of an over-the-wall philosophy of product development. That
philosophy means getting customer requirements, then going away to develop a product with no
further communication until you start getting customer feedback after the product has shipped.
Web 2.0 suggests that prototypes and user interface mockups should be exposed to customers
even during the design and specification process. It gives a new depth of significance to the
notion of an iterative development process.
12
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/04/15/OOXML
http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2005-06-02-a.html#sinofsky
14
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/11/16/microsoft_servers/print.html
13
As engineering organizations take up Web 2.0 technologies for internal use, they open the
barriers to other organizations in the company. For example, normal practice in the past has been
to create specifications by filling in the blanks of a specification template or by modifying the
specification documents from a previous product. Then, all too often, discussions lead to
refinements and revisions that do not make it into the specs because no one has time, and there’s
little motivation as long as everyone relevant takes part in the discussions. But then along come
the information developers, and all they have to go on is the specs, which are out of date.
However, they don’t discover the gaps until they can look at a product, which by then is close to
shipping.
As developers begin to use wikis and other Web 2.0 tools to write and maintain specifications,
the information is kept current in the very process of having the discussions and making
decisions and revisions. As vendors develop systems to funnel relatively unstructured wiki
content into XML schemas used by content developers to create customer content, writers can
take an active role earlier in the development cycle. Technical content can be worked into
customer-appropriate forms more quickly, more reliably, and with better quality assurance.
Web 2.0 opens barriers and broaches silos throughout the enterprise. Do trainers copy and paste
bits from customer documentation to create their own documentation and presentations? Does
the support organization warehouse its responses to customer problems in its own repository that
technical documenters and trainers never see? Sales support, marketing--all these silos of
information, experience, and expertise--can begin to communicate with each other—in the best
of all possible worlds.
However, there are sources of resistance in the enterprise that Web 2.0 does not encounter in the
general public.
First and most obviously, the enterprise has proprietary information that it rightly defends from
the free interchange of Web 2.0. That is the primary justification for an estimated 80 percent of
the content on the Internet being “dark,” never indexed by web crawlers and indexers. Of course,
a great deal that is locked behind firewalls is not truly proprietary. Businesses err on the side of
caution. In fact, one of the effects of Web 2.0 over time may be a relaxation of that caution, with
better management of what may safely be disclosed.
Within an intranet, Web 2.0 pushes against cultural factors that are not found abroad on the
Internet. For example, consider just some of the inward-facing and customer-facing concerns of
a development organization. Engineers have traditionally looked upon documentation as a kind
of clerical occupation, merely restating the specs and describing things after the hard work of
design and development has been done. The self-enfranchisement of the blog finds a ready
welcome but to elevate someone of lesser status is another matter. Conversely, for tech writers to
make the transition to be information developers calls for changes of attitude and aptitude that
better fit them as teammates in the development process. Engineers rightly resist “requirements
creep” during the course of development, so that an iterative development process is at best a
kind of “punctuated equilibrium,” to borrow a concept of biological evolution. In a traditional
“over the wall” process, the engineers’ need for a stable and well-understood development
environment conflicts with customers’ evolving knowledge of their desires and requirements
Finally, within the enterprise one finds resistance from those who defend their knowledge silos
as the source of their power and influence. But over time, resistance may be futile—not because
Web 2.0 is the Borg, to borrow a Star Trek metaphor, but because human beings like to
communicate and learn from one another when it is easy and fun. And that, Web 2.0 does well.
What will Web 2.0 Mean to the Culture that Created it?
We are left with the question, “If Web 2.0 is not a radical new technology and many of its individual
components are in use today, why does it appear to be so noteworthy?” The answer may be more a matter
of culture than of science. Indeed, with few exceptions, technology has followed a relatively stable path
of discovery, development, introduction, adoption, and evolution, leading many observers, certainly most
technologists, to conclude that that technology in itself is non-threatening and benign.
But as we have seen, the interaction between technology and culture has at times been neither stable nor
uniformly beneficial. Particularly confusing about this interaction is the fact that there often appears to be
little predictable relationship between the nature of the technological change and its cultural impact.
Obviously, something more than technological change itself is at work. If we can understand what that
something is and how it behaves, we may be able to better predict how culture is likely to respond to
evolving technology. As the pace of change quickens, especially in electronics, computers, and
information, this understanding may come none too soon. The latency period available for society to
absorb technological change is constantly shrinking, making its outcomes increasingly unpredictable and
irreversible. How then might we view Web 2.0 to understand where it falls on that continuum between
boon and bane?
If we accept that technology itself is neither good nor bad yet impacts society in good and bad ways, one
approach with some promise is a focus on the degree to which technological development provides
expanded avenues and outlets for expression of positive and negative impulses that already exist in
individuals and society.
After the development and use of nuclear weapons, for example, the world did not, as many feared it
would, spiral into oblivion through their proliferation and subsequent use in the many regional conflicts
since 1945. From this example, one might surmise that while nuclear technology is a remarkable and very
dangerous force, its introduction did not parallel a corollary impulse within society to destroy itself.
Conversely, while it didn’t create them, the rise of the Internet and Web appears to have magnified a
number of less than beneficial impulses in society, enabling rapid and dangerous proliferation of the fruits
of these impulses; from spam, to porn, to identity theft, to malevolent viruses with no apparent purpose
other than mischief.
In light of these phenomena, we must view with healthy skepticism any significant change in our
electronic infrastructure and the way we use it, not because of what it is, but of what cultural levers it may
turn. While those responsible for the changes are likely to emphasize (and perhaps only see) the positive
aspects of their creation, society will ultimately live with both good and bad and must therefore think
carefully about what forces among us will be brought to the fore by the contemplated changes. The
example of email is instructive. Had Ray Tomlinson, its developer in 1971, not missed the potential for
the blizzard of unwanted email messages we now call spam, he might have insisted, at the very least, on
more visibility into who is sending what to whom. While nothing would have completely prevented the
rise of spam, some simple changes to the mail and Internet protocols back then might have minimized it.
Given the prominent role of unintended consequences in technological evolution, perhaps we should look
closely at Web 2.0 before we embrace it at face value. Out of the box, there are a couple of Web 2.0
elements that could be troubling if not approached carefully. Perhaps the most controversial of these are
the concepts of user participation as the foundation for how the Web will work and the concept of
common ownership of its content.
The first of these features, described variously as “emergence” and “participation,” describes an
egalitarian Web in which how users think things should work is how they will work. While the analogy to
building the road wherever drivers want to go as they drive may be a stretch, one can’t help but wonder if
the appetites, prejudices, and maturity levels of millions of anonymous Web users are an appropriate basis
for how something as powerful as the World Wide Web should function. If the proposition—advanced
above—that technological change can magnify elements of our baser natures, then letting the mass of
users design the Web by their sheer participation may be akin to letting the devil design the details.
The second trend is embodied in the concept of common ownership of content. While the development of
a more involved user base for web content may bring a richer dimension to information resources than
possible under traditional “authority-based” systems, it may also saddle us with a blizzard of content,
comment, and rancor, much of it the product of individual users’ naiveté, narcissism, or downright
malevolence. Once a reality, this kind of content haystack could make finding the desired needle virtually
impossible for all but the infinitely perseverant. Wikipedia, often cited as a conceptual foundation for
Web 2.0 is described as “radical experiment in trust.” The question facing those who would understand
Web 2.0, however, is this: “can foundations like Wikipedia be extended infinitely without breaking down
into information anarchy?”
Given the growing cultural trends of immediacy, impatience, and the desire—often described as “the
right”—to be heard, especially among the younger generations, one might wonder where a user-directed
and user-owned Web will take us and what now-hidden impulses it will unleash. While perhaps not a
reason for undue pessimism, recent experience with technological evolution appears to offer ample
justification for detailed and thoughtful examination, from perspectives much wider than the technologies
themselves or the assumptions made by their promoters.
The Internet, with its ability to rapidly impact potentially billions of participants, must be viewed as a
cultural lever of unprecedented power and significance. If we are careful, it can deliver many of its
heralded benefits with an acceptable level of negative side effects. If we are not, however, it can and may
give us just the opposite. But do we have the means to exercise such deliberate care and control? With the
enablement of Web 2.0 technologies, is the herd of cats already out of the bag?