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The Post-Modern Rhetoric of High Technology

"The Post-Modern Internet, Web 2.0, and its leaders have a responsibility to mature in their power"
By Skinner Layne
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June 20, 2006 10:15 AM EDT
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 24,315
Three unemployed technology marketers are sitting around the ping-pong table in their garage in the year 2008, depressed and trying to come up with a new idea to re-boot their careers. One of them says to the group “I’ve got it!”  The others perk up and direct their attention to the proverbial light bulb over his head.  “I hear that there are several new technology startups who are developing the next big thing in Internet software, but they have no idea what to call it.”  The others nod their heads in active agreement.  “We can offer to promote their companies if we just come up with a name for what they are doing, and I’ve got the best idea already.  Nobody’s ever thought of it.”  Ripe with anticipation, the other two marketers clamor for him to spit it out.  With a grandiose vigor, he stands up and proclaims “Web 3.0!”
 
Web 2.0, Search 2.0, Life 2.0, World 2.0.  The metaphor of software versions to describe technological and social phenomena once upon a time was clever.  But as with all clever sayings, it became overused and is now cliché. The draw toward terms like “Web 2.0”  is of course that it makes a strong implication that what it represents is a “next generation” of something good enough to have gotten a second run.  The trouble with such monikers, though, is their post-modern tendency to merely be “what came after.”
 
Enlightenment thinking was clear and organized.  There were disagreements amongst the thinkers of the Era, but the Era itself was definable. Post-modernism cannot be defined except by saying what it is not.  It is not modern; it is what came after the Enlightenment.  “Web 2.0” suffers from the same malaise. People across the globe are publishing countless articles and books to try to define Web 2.0, but like its underpinning philosophy, it is not easily defined. In fact, to put it into a box would be to contradict its very nature. 
 
The abandonment of the Enlightenment by the Post-Moderns was not a revolution in Philosophy, but a rebellion against it.  The Post-Moderns concerned themselves with the demolition of power-relationships, authority-structures, even the architecture of language itself.  The results have been decidedly mixed.  The nihilism of The Bomb, the ethical bankruptcy of eugenics and similar traffics in human suffering are examples of its negative effects.  On the other side, however, is the emancipation of women, racial equality movements, gay rights, youth voting rights, and so on. 
 
As we watch the advent of the Post-Modern Internet embodied in the Web 2.0 movement, we will see its effects reverberate throughout society.  Web 2.0 proclaims to be the era of the User.  The power-structures that defined Web 1.0 were a destination-driven experience, one created not by users, but for users, and with little input or insight from them at all.  The rebellion has been quite different.  Blogging has created pressrooms of one. Social networking empowers regular individuals to reach mass audiences and peer-groups through a series of simple clicks.  Video-sharing has made it possible for lay people to produce satire and political speech with budgets of almost nothing. 
There is little doubt (in my mind at least) that Web 2.0 will continue to annihilate the current strangleholds on power and influence of the Mainstream Media, traditional movie production studios and distribution agencies, political parties and interest groups, teachers, scholars, religious and educational institutions, corporations, and governments.  The Post-Modern Internet, Web 2.0, and its leaders have a responsibility to mature in their power, however.  Web 2.0 can take two distinct directions, and it is perhaps the rhetoric of it all that will define the path.  Web 2.0 can be the French Revolution of Technology or it can be the American Revolution of Technology.
 
Joseph Schumpeter’s winds of creative destruction are blowing especially hard in the Internet technology world today, with remarkable improvements to our daily lives.  But these winds can blow too hard too often, and an even older economic law, the Law of Diminishing Returns, begins to take over. Our wild-eyed radical phase must ultimately give way to some replacement.  We cannot permanently be the rebels.  At some point, people will get "2.0 fatigue."  That point may be upon us as it is.  People eventually want stability. The problem with successful rebellions is that rebels rarely know how to govern or else they take up the mantle of those against whom they rebelled, and like Orwell’s pigs in Animal Farm, they begin to sleep in the old rulers’ beds. 
 
Ultimately, therefore, the success of Web 2.0 depends less on what it accomplishes in the present and more on what groundwork it lays for the future.  Indeed, it is rather ironic that the final metric for Web 2.0 is what comes after it. The early 20th century British essayist G.K. Chesterton once observed “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” 

Web 2.0 companies would do well to take his advice to heart.

Published June 20, 2006 – Reads 24,315
Copyright © 2006 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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More Stories By Skinner Layne

Skinner Layne, 24, is Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of NeXplore Technologies, Inc., a Web 2.0 Social Computing company based in Frisco, Texas, where his responsibilities include the formulation, development, and implementation of grassroots marketing strategies, investor relations and capital formation, and devising innovative ways to monetize Web 2.0 properties. Prior to moving to the Dallas area, Skinner served as Campaign Advisor and Strategist to U.S. Congressman John Boozman, as well as managing and consulting several statewide and state legislative races in Arkansas. He was educated at the University of Arkansas, where he was a Chancellor's Scholar, studying Economics, Political Science, and Philosophy and served as President of the Student Senate.

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Most Recent Comments
Keith Duddy 10/23/06 09:21:22 PM EDT

Wow... you really have NO IDEA what postmodernism is, do you? How can a phenomenon emerging from Semoitics and structuralist literary analysis of the 1950s, which came to be labeled as post modern in the 1970s because it followed the modernist art & architecture movements, which culminated in "the international style" (read huge sqaure skyscrapers), possibly be associated with eugenics and the atom bomb (both of which can be charachterised - if you draw a long bow - as modernist totalising ideas)? Do your homework.

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Tim Payne 10/21/06 03:03:02 PM EDT

I study economics and philosophy -- Skinner, I think you are really doing a hodge-podge blend in this article.

Diminishing returns don't seem too applicable with your argument.

I like your ideas. I'd love to seem them much more fleshed out in a three piece essay.

1)Enlightment v. Postmodernism
2)Web 1.0 v. Web 2.0
3)Web 2.0 Benefits v. Web 2.0 inherent destructiveness( or whatever your conclusion wants to be...)
Mike Wagner 10/19/06 06:51:22 PM EDT

Many have been talking about a recent issue of the McKinsey Quarterly that speaks of what they call "Tacit Interactions". When people consider Enterprise 2.0 / Web 2.0 / Office 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis, they need to consider these tools in the context of these tacit interactions. Tacit being ad hoc or on the fly and this represents 40% of a typical business day time according to McKinsey.
Mike Wagner 10/19/06 06:51:20 PM EDT

Many have been talking about a recent issue of the McKinsey Quarterly that speaks of what they call "Tacit Interactions". When people consider Enterprise 2.0 / Web 2.0 / Office 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis, they need to consider these tools in the context of these tacit interactions. Tacit being ad hoc or on the fly and this represents 40% of a typical business day time according to McKinsey.
Peter Metzinger 10/19/06 06:41:37 PM EDT

Personally I don't think we are coming to an end of web 2.0. I rather believe we are going to live in a world where old and new will be living next to each other and people choose from both models the one they consider most appropriate in a given situation.
Adrian McMenamin 10/19/06 06:37:57 PM EDT

Yesterday I finished raeding 'Ambient Findability', a thin but well illustrated O'Reilly volume about the importance of findability in the coming world of ubiquitous computing (or 'ubicomp' as it is referred to throughout the book).

The book does explain a lot of 'Web 2.0' jargon - I now know what a 'folksonomy' (the popularly authored taxonomy of the internet generated by such things as Technorati tags) and the 'semantic web' (cannot be botherd to explain that one) are. It also made me think about the limitations of a Google-search driven world of information.