Well, might as well dive right in there! :-)
You've probably heard of 'Web 2.0', right? It's one of those terms that has entered the language without much explanation for anyone not already involved with it. So what, inexactly, is it?
Oh, now I see why there aren't many explanations: it's far too big a discussion for this space! I mean, good people study this stuff already! And others have helped make it into an identifiable lifestyle... Suffice to say for now that it's based squarely on the idea of users of the internet actually becoming responsible for large swathes of the content, which can then be 'shared' in a variety of senses. But it's easier just to get an idea of it from using the various major Web 2.0 sites.
In some ways, the early poster childs were the venerable and mighty Wikipedia – and the all-conquering YouTube, both obvious examples of collaborative endeavour. Nowadays, Facebook is what possibly comes to mind first (in terms of media attention anyway), though tomorrow it will doubtless be something a bit more cutting edge. We'll be reporting, for sure, from some of these as time goes by...
So, there's info-entertainment (see above); there's 'social networking' (My Space et al); there are many forms of social bookmarking (stumbleupon, de.licio.us, etc.); a plethora of bittorrent sites of arguable legality; virtual worlds of many flavours, community-based discussion and tech support forums; and many other kinds of distracting, intoxicating craziness that require whole websites just to keep track of – you can check out one here at TechCrunch. And, of course, myriad questions arise for anyone who stops to think about all this: issues and controversies of money, time, energy, attention, ownership, accuracy, etc.
Now. I'm not attempting to be remotely thorough here, just to give a broad smattering. In fact, I'm really most interested (because my work involves it) in the specific phenomenon of communities who upload content to a central access point as part of a pre-structured and pre-designed environment (eg. The Internet Archive project), thus creating a new web-based 'community', where the 'shared ground' is reflected in the 'creative commons' license attached to all uploaded material).
And, all that said, I think the 'Web 2.0' designation is a bit of a phantom (so does Tim Berners Lee! – and he sort of invented the web). The behavior encouraged by and in these kinds of web contexts isn't really much different from the behaviour modelled by the first internet newsgroups (Usenet, Netscape, etc)! That was how it all started for many users, and the exchange of information – combined with implicit possibilities for relationship that newsgroups represented – was what gave the worldwide web its eventual impetus in the broader consumer realm. Well, that alongside anonymous access to porn...
I reckon the ongoing excitement about Web 2.0 environments is the natural extension of the interest that accompanied early filesharing (peer-to-peer) programs like Napster, which also combined exchange of data with the sense of being part of something cool with others with whom you had something in common (music, lifestyle). And I do think this model fits quite well with a scattered, international 'community' such as the Fwbo, with some adaptation.
I'm certainly very interested in exploring the possibilities of having an effective and flexible pre-structured, pre-designed and moderated context (ie. an element of central editorial control), within which any invited local Fwbo community can control and contribute its own material, thus adding to an extended site 'community' that provides access to information for anyone with an interest, wherever they are in the world, in a form comprehensible and appropriate to them...
I think the way forward for the FWBO in terms of the web is this kind of approach – which, as it happens (and not coincidentally!) is more cautious than free-for-all models of exchange (we define the 'shared community ground' far more specifically), yet also consciously modelled on the way the Movement itself was set up and originally envisioned. The watchwords would (still) be 'community', 'autonomy', 'active relationship', 'collaborative', 'consensual'...
So, to coin a phrase, "It's not Web 2.0, but you can't say it's Web 1.0..."
1 comment:
I'm certainly very interested in exploring the possibilities of having an effective and flexible pre-structured, pre-designed and moderated context (ie. an element of central editorial control), within which any invited local Fwbo community can control and contribute its own material, thus adding to an extended site 'community' that provides access to information for anyone with an interest, wherever they are in the world, in a form comprehensible and appropriate to them...
that's interesting candradasa, and i feel comfortable with that model, i think.
i think the structured/unstructured approach does reflect our structure. if it's not too high falutin' here's my favorite quote from bhante's history of my going for refuge...
Though I had realized that Going for Refuge was the central act of the Buddhist life, and that it meant organizing one's existence round the Three Jewels, that realization had so far found expression only in my personal life....
But now the situation was entirely changed. The twelve people who made up the Western Buddhist Order had `taken' the Three Refuges and Ten Precepts from me, - had been ordained as upasakas and upasikas by me, - and their understanding of the meaning of Going for Refuge coincided with mine, at least partly. Like one lamp lighting a dozen others, I had been able to share with them my realization of the absolute centrality of the act of Going for Refuge and henceforth that realization would find expression not in my life only but also in theirs. Not that the realization in question was something fixed and final. It could continue to grow and develop, and find expression in a hundred ways as yet unthought of. ...
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