I’ve talked about how society fits into the world of technology. As consumers, we use the Internet, social networking, remixing etc. as tools for social collaboration. But where does the corporate structure fit in with all of this? Trebor Scholz’s article Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0 talks specifically about the corporate takeover of the web and how they’ve used these socially collaborative networks to rake in huge amounts of cash.
The first thing Scholz points out is that Web 2.0 is actually not new at all. The ideologies seemingly held by Web 2.0 are really the same ideologies that have existed since the beginning; something called “new newness” in Scholz’s article. Wikis and the idea of user submitted content have been around since the 90’s and email’s beginnings can be traced to 1973, when ARPANET’s email program was its most popular feature. The same goes for blogs (daily posts on personal websites began in 1994), social networking (classmates.com was founded in 1995), RSS feeds (started in 1999) and CSS (which became web standard in 1998).
This is where the corporatization of the web can be seen. The idea of Web 2.0 is really just a product branding, originally created by Tim O’Reilly, the founder of a large technology publishing house, and his colleague when they needed a catchy title for an upcoming conference. “The Web 2.0 hype drew broad media attention and financial resources to businesses that…profit from networked social production…and collective intelligence.” Web 2.0 caught on very quickly and it was seen as another technology boom. In reality these ideas had been growing since the beginning. O’Reilly had successfully taken ideas and core values that are, by technology standards, ancient, and branded them as “Web 2.0”, a new and socially cutting-edge movement.
By understanding that Web 2.0 is actually just a rebranding, we begin to see the capitalist's hand online. In his article, Scholz talks about wikinomics author Don Tapscott and his ideas about Web 2.0 and capitalism. Scholz says, “Authority in the Web 2.0 world is introduced through property and the availability of means of production. The latter is available to users and so are the means of distribution but the virtual real estate belongs to Yahoo’s YouTube.” YouTube is a perfect example of capitalism in the Web 2.0 world. The average person has the ability, or “means of production”, to express themselves by making a video and they even have the “means of distribution” so the whole world can see their video rant about Justin Bieber not winning the best new artist Grammy. We don’t realize, or just don’t care, that YouTube, now a giant corporation, can exploit that content we post to make money. This is the “power in the Web 2.0 world” that Sholz talks about.
As Scholz says in his article, “the users/producers on the Social Web are the base to the super structure of virtual real estate owners.” The users of Web 2.0 technology are all contributing to the big corporations who own the networks and databases we adopt into our everyday lives. The more people post on facebook, make videos for youtube or join flickr, the more money these corporations make. This is the crux of Web 2.0; it is really more a capitalist buzzword than a term symbolizing online community. While Web 2.0 allows for increased unity and democratization online, we need to realize as Scholz says, “our social life online is always entrenched in market relationships, no matter if users are motivated by profit.”
So how do we “re-imagine the social web as a place for unmarketed, non-mainstream projects” as Scholz asks in his article? I don’t know what the answer is, but a non-capitalist frame of mind seems necessary when it comes to the Internet. If not a completely non-capitalist framework, there needs to be more of a balance between the two if the web is to survive as it was once envisioned to be.
Read Trebor Scholz's article online here
