Fergus Cassidy

I’m not fond of the term Web 2.0. Good name for a book maybe. To reduce the complex and evolutionary nature of networking technology to such a simplistic expression reveals print and broadcast media habits of old: ‘let’s give it a name so we know what we’re talking about’.

Business also prefers the naming game. If there’s money to be made, you gotta know where and how. Does it really matter what the pesky kids are up to? No. Until Rupert Murdoch and Google shell out gazillions on domain names. If there’s gold in them thar hills, you need somewhere to stake a claim.

So what are the pesky kids up to anyway? Well they’ve also been given a name: digital natives. The rest of us, by implication, are mere tourists. Here to check our email and book cheap flights. Occasionally looking in amazement/amusement at what the natives are up to.

What they are up to, we are informed, is ‘social networking’, which is even more perplexing to a digital immigrant. There’s me thinking that social networking has been around since the voice box dropped down lower in our throats and we managed to stand on our own two feet.

But it’s not. It’s found in web sites named with variations of My or You. And that’s where the pesky kids hang out these days, busily building their own culture. These are the kids who were once able to programme the video recorder while the olds looked on in confused resignation.

Now those same kids are video directors, editors and actors in their own productions. If the tools are ready to hand the make their own creations.

There is nothing about Web 2.0 that hasn’t been seen before. Anyone who ever temporarily lost the use of their legs while trying to put together a newsletter or ‘magazine’ on a floor knows what I mean. Or freezing their asses off in some grotty garage building a radio transmitter.

We use the tools that are there in front of us. The ones we don’t have we try and get but plough on regardless. The kids ten years from now will chuckle patronisingly at the best efforts of today. And on it goes.

What is new – and exciting – is that the kids are using the internet in such vast numbers. Creativity abounds. It might not be to everyone’s taste but that’s the beauty of it. Taste is becoming non-hierarchical, a break with top-down culture.

And while they’re at it, the kids are experimenting with the limits and weaknesses of the network’s technologies, bending and breaking them until they give up or finding new ways of doing things..

What they have going for them in a big way is connection speeds. No longer just the amount required to consume but enough to upload their myriad creations. And that’s never enough.

So I prefer Bandwidth 2.0. For the time being anyway.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, 10 January 2007 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.