Cyber Means Pilot

Dan Patterson from ABC News was on this WEEK in TECH discussing how companies need to think about web development now and the future and I think he hit on a key point:

“Our tools and our gadgets and gizmos, they are all well and good. But really this is not about our tools and gadgets, it about determining the way media and information flows in the 21st century…This is the democratization of the dissemination of information and you need to understand not just how Twitter works, you need understand not just how Facebook works, but you need to understand things like trust and community.”
TWiT 187: So Say We All (1:11:45 - 1:12:16)

I mentioned in a previous post about how the next generation of the web should be more than a simple platform and more than a toy to tinker with. It must work with users to not only for for the development of thoughts and ideas and really it must go beyond the basic points of connection and trust and community. The web must become a place of social engagement in order for the Internet not to become another source of entertainment. The Internet is a hypertextual experience, it must also become either hypermediated or edge closer to a point of becoming a universal translator of global experiences

It is this spirit of experimentation that I am trying something new. I’m going to start publish my blog at squarespace. I’m in the process of moving some of the post on the new site and until that happens I’m going to post twice, once on the original site cyberstudies.blog.com and the other time it will be on cyberstudies.squarespace.com. The reason being is that I hope have a standalone web address soon and I want to be right to post on it as soon as it becomes available. Until it does, I’ll just post twice.

For quite some time, I’ve been using, consuming and generally playing around in the sandbox of what some may call “Web 2.0.” The term seems to have some weight and power behind it. Tim O’ Reilly tried to define the space and what makes 2.0 different from its 1.0 form. The major difference touched on by this article is the ability of users to control their experience online. This second generation of web development is defined by the read/write capabilities of users on the site. The web is now editable and has the ability to express any point of view in real time. However, we’ve been using this technology for almost five years. Therefore, it is fair to assume that there may be a change in how we conduct ourselves online. The question is how? 
 
I think it is important to compare how the web has developed to the development of a society. In order for a society to develop, there must a common language and common set of rules that everybody agrees (“a social contract”). The development of transferring digital information through copper and fiber-optic lines, web addresses, programming languages and hardware set up the first stage of this society. This could be compare to the development of the basic “survival tools” of the society. We learn to make fire and build shelter in the digital world through the structure developed by the founders of the Internet. We survived primordial ooze ooze for almost 15 years. Then, we moved to the pushing the envelope of creation by add modules to the language of the Internet to allow for a democratization of the channels present in the World Wide Web.

According to Paul Graham the force behind “Web 2.0″ came from three factors; the root language Ajax, the democratization of the web and the knowledge to not mistreat those using the web. Under these three forces, the concept of web as platform could begin. We’ve lived, worked and play in this envirnoment for several years. But, it’s starting to feel that the platform will need to turn into something else in order to survive and to allow companies and individual to profit from their work. The next construct of the web will come from economic concern maybe more so than the ability to change the platform through technological/lingustical/mechanical means.