Web 2.0 Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This sample Web 2.0 Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

The term Web 2.0 first entered the public sphere in 2004 following conferences and events organized by O’Reilly Media. Initially the term was little more than an ill-defined buzzword. However, in a much-cited discussion, O’Reilly (2005) gave the concept greater analytic content. He argued that it was possible to identify a shift toward user-generated web content of various sorts. The early signs of this growth came with the emergence of blogs, but these were very quickly followed by a range of other forms of contributory practice such as ”tagging,” ”feeds,” ”commenting,” ”noting,” ”reviewing,” ”rating,” ”mashing up,” ”making friends,” and so on.

A very crude set of distinctions might be drawn between Web 1.0 (1993-2003) and Web 2.0 (2004 onwards). If Web 1.0 was primarily about ”reading” or ”browsing” web pages, Web 2.0 is still about this, but with the added ability that people can now ”write” and ”contribute” as well. If the primary unit of content of Web 1.0 was the ”page,” within Web 2.0 it has shifted toward the ”post” or the ”record.” If the primary state of Web 1.0 was ”static,” the primary state of Web 2.0 is ”dynamic”: Not only do more things move about on the screen, but actual content changes as more and more people contribute, post, respond, edit, amend, link, and so on. If Web 1.0 was primarily viewed through a computer screen using a web browser of some sort, Web 2.0 can be viewed through an increasingly wide range of devices -PCs certainly, but now also myriad mobile devices. If content within Web 1.0 was generally created by web coders and designers, within Web 2.0 content is created by all users, albeit within the context of templates provided by coders and designers. If the social and cultural base of Web 1.0 was primarily that of web designers and ”geeks,” Web 2.0 is viewed as a ”cooler” domain offering up the possibility of a new culture of public research. Finally, if Web 1.0 was still generally ”consumed” by users, Web 2.0 represents an ontological blurring of the distinction between ”consumption” and ”production” as more and more users ”work” without financial reward in order to produce web content.

Although the unity of Web 2.0 derives from this large-scale shift toward user-generated web content, the form that this takes is highly varied.

Blogging has quickly become part of the cultural mainstream. A blog – a compression of ”web log” – is a website where an individual offers commentary, reflections, and/or descriptions of phenomena.
Wikis can be understood as user-generated resources constructed and edited by anyone who wishes to contribute. The most well known is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
Folksonomies involve the locating and marking or classifying of a web page with a metadata label. Tags act as metadata operating behind web pages enabling them to be organized into classified networks. Two of the most widely used are Flickr and YouTube.
Mashups are ”hybrid applications, where two or more technologies or services are conflated into a completely new, novel, service” (Maness 2006: 9). The point of mashups is that they present existing information in new ways. Mashups utilizing maps are, for example, a form of web-based ”do-it-yourself” geographic information system.
Social network sites (SNS) are perhaps the most socially significant of the Web 2.0 applications, particularly as the number of users continues to escalate. SNS users build profiles about themselves, posting photos, videos, information about their backgrounds, views, work, consumption preferences, and so on, and make ”friends” with other users. Examples include Facebook and Myspace.

The sociology of Web 2.0 is in its infancy but the phenomenon demands that we radically rethink many of the binaries we have traditionally worked with: consumption/production; expert/amateur; public/private; virtual/real; and many others.

Bibliography:

Beer, D. & Burrows, R. (2007) Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: some initial considerations. Sociological Research Online (12) 5: www.socresonline.org.uk/12/5/17.html.
Maness, J. M. (2006) Library 2.0 theory: Web 2.0 and its implications for libraries. Webology (3) (2): http://www.webology.org/2006/v3n2/a25.html
O’Reilly, T. (2005) What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software: http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html