I thought I should give some thought to authoring a comment on the technology decade now ending. For me, the 2010’s was the decade of Web 2.0 decline. I have always attributed the phrase Web 2.0 to Tim O’Reilly whom I think it appropriate to say popularized the phrase, but the Wikipedia source of all knowledge claims the phrase was first used by Darci DiNucci. O’Reilly noted that the Internet in the early 2000’s had become a platform allowing applications to be available on the Internet rather than being limited to the desktop. In addition because of their online presence, these applications offered a social opportunity. The notion of participation via the Internet was a hopeful way to look at politics, global awareness, and learning.
My wife and I had an educational technology textbook at the time and the generative potential of this shared social space and the opportunities to create in several formats fit very well with a core concept in our writing. Several alternatives to the phrase Web 2.0 captured our thinking more effectively for educators. The same collection of features labeled Web 2.0 was sometimes called the Read/Write web or the participatory web. We adapted concepts such as Writing to Learn and Teaching to Learn to the generative and social opportunities Web 2.0 made available.
We tried to stay true to the participatory opportunity of Web 2.0. I had the opportunity to run personal servers when I was still working at a University and had web pages as soon as this became possible. My original blog launched in 2002 using early Blogger software you could run on your own equipment. The promise of wikis was also appealing and I developed a wiki focused on the potential of “The Participatory Web” to explore the potential of a textbook offered using this tool. While wikis are by intent designed to encourage participation and shared authorship, my interest was mostly in using this software as an easy way to offer content and I did not allow others to modify what I had written. I did use a shared wiki in my graduate Instructional Design class. The wiki content from my personal server was eventually modified for sharing as linked pages using WordPress as the software for this platform was easier for me to keep current.
I have had a sense that online participation is fading. I recently came across a BuzzFeed article making the same observation and examined possible explanations. The following excerpt offers the core observation from this article.
The internet of the 2010s will be defined by social media’s role in the 2016 election, the rise of extremism, and the fallout from privacy scandals like Cambridge Analytica. But there’s another, more minor theme to the decade: the gradual dismantling and dissolution of an older internet culture.
The BuzzFeed article goes through the decline or closing of multiple services (e.g., MySpace, blogs, Google Reader, Flickr) and offers some general concerns. For example, does the elimination of services users have contributed to for years lead to a skittishness with investment in new platforms. A version of this same problem occurs when services move from one company to another and the new company changes the rules (e.g., Flickr). I have the luxury of renting server space so I am less dependent on what individual companies decide to do, but the downturn of interest in reading online content generated and maintained by individuals determines whether there is an audience for those of us investing in this model of authoring.
I wish I could offer a remedy. I am most concerned that the educational opportunities of writing to learn will become less attractive without experienced educators and an authentic audience for student work. My project for this year’s winter trip is to update my participatory web site to offer more current tutorials and argue that participation is a partial remedy to the dissemination of false information. Too much consumption and not enough contemplation and participation would seem a reasonable way to address what we now face in the decline of Web 2.0.
