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?