2.0? Just Say No...

Yawn...
Image via Wikipedia

Why oh why do people keeping adding '2.0' to everything?

I appreciate that it may have become a way of saying 'new' without actually saying 'new', but when does 'new'  become 'old'?  When do we get to 3.0?  Who decides?  And what if there is a whole lot of 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 etc. going on in between?

Tim O'Reilly and Tim Berners-Lee at the 2009 'Web 2.0 Summit' View the video.
(Photo credit: LMarino)

Since the first O'Reilly Media 'Web 2.0' conference way back in 2004, this term has become the standard way of referring to web technologies that are dialogic and interactive, but these approaches didn't suddenly appear in 2004, there was no seismic shift in the way the web worked.

In fact, it so irritated one of the fathers of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, who created the web with exactly this sort of behaviour in mind from the very start, that he refers to it as mere 'jargon', saying in a 2006 interview for IBM:

Tim Berners-Lee...talking sense. 
Image via Wikipedia

"Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along."

Sadly, the '2.0' suffix has caught on, to the point where even Berners-Lee somewhat reluctantly acknowledges its popularity in a later interview. But now we are seeing it tagged on to every subject or issue imaginable. Google any macro issue or academic subject area along with '2.0' and you're likely to find a whole heap of Slideshare presentations, conference papers and journal articles, all singing the praises of 'new' versions of old ideas (try "Society 2.0" for example and you'll get around 148,000 results).

But ask yourself, have we really seen a shift from 'Version 1' to 'Version 2' in every subject that has been given the '2.0' treatment?  Doesn't the relationship to software releases imply some sort of major upgrade?  How many elements of society have really had a wholesale renewal and replacement in recent years?

Well, if we take the Internet as a case in point 'Web 2.0' is surely not a new release, in Internet terms it's pretty damn old now!  Surely the development of the Internet is a classic example of evolution rather than 'sea-change'.  It is a medium that has developed incrementally, fractally, in all sorts of directions.

If you are a regular reader you'll be used to these occasional rants about poor use of language, and although some points of spelling and grammar may irritate me, they are not really that important as long as meaning is conveyed.  For me, it is disingenuous use of language that really riles.  When there fakery is afoot, it really gets to me, and this is why '2.0' makes me angry. It's a cop-out - and one I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned with both in academia and on the 'professional' conference circuit.

Using the sorts of sales techniques that give us marketers a bad name to repackage old ideas, but with more fashionable language and a new mnemonic, in order to sell a book or journal article is more and more common it seems.  Delivering conference presentations that have less substance than your average stick of candy-floss, but dressed up with a beard and delivered with fine, dense words is even more prevalent.  There is so much insubstantial work out there - but hey, if the language is right, the credentials look right, and you're a white male over fifty (in academia) or under 35 (in the tech world), the chances are you'll get away with it anyway.   More fool us for falling for it though, eh?

But I digress; what I really mean is that Web 2.0 is nothing new, it's merely a buzzword that has become bigger than anyone ever intended.  So please, can we drop it now, and instead start looking beneath the glossy veneer at what's really happening in our complex, incremental, mixed-up messed-up world?  We don't need a name (or number) for it, we just need to be clear about what it is we mean when we talk about change.  How liberating would that be?

The Evil Office: Mission, Motivation and the Moral Imperative

Say it quickly and you might mix it up with something more presidential...but the evil office is something we've been pondering in our own little office on the fourth floor since last Friday. 

Following a meandering discussion and brainstorm of the possible re-uses of spent Bic pens (placemats, insect hotels etc. - please add any further suggestions in the comments box below), Friday afternoon in the LG/SO office ended with a discussion on the nature of Evil (with a capital 'E').  This was prompted by some wild speculation on my behalf on the motives of people in the public eye for their actions and from the suggestion that adopting Google's famously simple (and possibly ironic, although that's another discussion) 'Don't be Evil' mission was something that I believe could have a profound effect on people.

Within a few minutes we had knocked up and hung our own 'Don't be Evil' poster on the office wall, with a view to running a pseudo experiment to gauge the reactions of those who encounter it in our office.  The first person to walk into the office noticed it straight away and commented on it.  I can confirm that they were in no way evil whilst in the office (so far so good).

Measuring evil is, however, quite a difficult thing to do.  First you have to define it.  This is not easy.  What's morally wrong to me may seem perfectly acceptable behaviour to you (e.g. entering box junctions when your exit is not clear).  Evil is subjective, but there are probably a few basic tenets on which we could agree: evil as malicious behaviour, with the intention of wrongdoing or harm.  So, let's take that as our basic definition for now.

Measuring this is the next step - and seemingly even more difficult.  We tried Googling it (!), and came up with several highly amusing 'How evil are you?' style quizzes, which seemed to involve lots of questions about saving cats from burning buildings and stealing from your grandmother.  Clearly, these are not questions we can ask everyone who steps into the office, so we're going for a combination of  more subjective techniques (personal views on the general evilness of behaviour in our office) and a 'saliency' measure (i.e. do people notice the poster? do they comment on it?  or do they just glance at it shiftily while they speak...yes we've had that already).

Obviously this experiment will not stand up to academic scrutiny, but it's fun to see the reactions.  One interesting aspect of the phrase 'Don't Be Evil' is the negative imperative it uses.  My old boss used to tell a story about the power of negative language; I don't know if it's true or modern myth, but apparently just before Chris Waddle took his penalty at the 1990 World Cup, England manager Bobby Robson said to him 'don't miss!'.  Waddle promptly sent the ball into row Z and England's world cup hopes were history.  My ex-boss believed that negatives in language are sometimes filtered out by our brains, and that we hear, and do, the opposite when told not to do something.  With this theory in mind, we would perhaps expect to see an increase in evil behaviour in our office, and the logical next step might be to suggest that Google's mission may actually be encouraging its employees to 'Be Evil'.

Ok, enough of the conspiracy theories - I'm not totally convinced by this argument, but I have an open mind and will keep you posted on the results of our little experiment (if I've not gone over to the dark side of course). 

Oh, and Google - how about positively re-framing your mission statement?

Be good?

The next office experiment beckons...