[csaa-forum] FCJ new issue—"Web 2.0: before, during and after the event"—the Fibreculture Journal issue 14

Tue Oct 13 10:33:16 CST 2009

http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue14/

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The Fibreculture Journal is affiliated with the Open Humanities Press -
http://openhumanitiespress.org/

The Fibreculture Journal is a peer reviewed international journal that
encourages critical and speculative interventions in the debate and
discussions concerning information and communication technologies and their
policy frameworks, network cultures and their informational logic, new media
forms and their deployment, and the possibilities of socio-technical
invention and sustainability. The Fibreculture Journal encourages
submissions that extend research into critical and investigative networked
theories, knowledges and practices.

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Web 2.0: before, during and after the event
An issue of the Fibreculture Journal critically exploring the ontogenesis of
Web 2.0

http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue14/

Issue Editors: Anna Munster (College of Fine Arts, UNSW, Sydney) and Andrew
Murphie (School of English, Media and Performing Arts, UNSW, Sydney)

Refereed Articles

Dreams of a New Medium
Aden Evens
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue14/issue14_evens.html

Beyond the 'Networked Public Sphere': Politics, Participation and Technics
in Web 2.0
Ben Roberts
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue14/issue14_roberts.html

Between Promise and Practice: Web 2.0, Intercultural Dialogue and Digital
Scholarship
Ien Ang and Nayantara Pothen
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue14/issue14_ang_pothen.html

Mapping Commercial Web 2.0 Worlds: Towards a New Critical Ontogenesis
Ganaele Langlois, Fenwick McKelvey, Greg Elmer, and Kenneth Werbin
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue14/issue14_langlois_et_al.html

Contexts and Provocations

The Digital Given: 10 Web 2.0 Theses
Geert Lovink, Ned Rossiter and Ippolita
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue14/issue14_ippolita_lovink_rossiter.html

Co-creation and the new industrial paradigm of peer production
Michel Bauwens
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue14/issue14_bauwens.html

'Web 2.0' as a new context for artistic practices
Juan Martin Prada
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue14/issue14_prada.html

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>From the Editorial (http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue14/):

web 2.0 is a doing word.

Although Tim O'Reilly famously declared in 2005 that 'Web 2.0 is not a
technology, it is an attitude', in 2009 it's clear he's grammatically
incorrect (O'Reilly, 2005). Web 2.0 is not an "is", or not only this. Web
2.0 is also a verb or, as they taught us in primary school, it's a doing
word. Here's a list of some web 2.0 things to do: apping, blogging, mapping,
mashing, geocaching, tagging, searching, shopping, sharing, socialising and
wikkiing. And the list goes on. Yet as the list goes on it becomes apparent
that part of what web 2.0 does, while doing all the things on this list and
more, is colonise everything in the network. It seems that there is no part
of networked thought, activity or life that is not now web 2.0. To draw up
another kind of list, a list of 'things' that have been done over by web
2.0, we find: Gov 2.0, Identity 2.0, XHTML™ 2.0, Classroom 2.0, and publish2
...and the list goes on. Anything can become or be 2.0 as long as it
demonstrates or is affiliated with a certain set of qualities. A list of
typical Qualities 2.0 might look something like this: dynamic,
participatory, engaged, interoperable, user-centred, open, collectively
intelligent and so on. Clearly an 'attitude' can go a long way.

What, then, do we call something that sits somewhere between doing, being
and qualifying? That systematises, indexes and categorises, on the one hand,
and yet, on the other, willfully overruns categories and enthusiastically
keeps adding to its own lists of things, activities and characteristics?
That is poised between what has just happened (web 1.0) and what will be
about to happen in a minute, soon, or later (web 3.0, the semantic web, next
web)? That seems ineffable, not quite there (attitude) yet is also
everywhere (lists, lists and more lists)?

In light of the strange space and odd temporal dimension it inhabits, it
seems appropriate to call web 2.0 an 'event'. Something has certainly
happened to the web as we knew it circa 2001 and that something is both a
new technical infrastructure for online ICTs – what is now referred to as
'an architecture of participation' (O'Reilly, 2004) – and a change in
attitude, a change in the ways we think about doing, communicating and
inhabiting networks. The web 2.0 event moves the technical infrastructure of
networks even closer to the transitive, to the nature of event itself.
Events are things that happen to things, aren't they? Perhaps not,
especially when we are dealing with phenomena that are truly dynamic, where
change, hence unpredictability and fuzziness, is their immanent modality.
When we start to flesh out what the event 'web 2.0' comprises, it is not
some thing (a technology, an attitude) happening to some thing (web 1.0,
information-based networks) already existing. Rather, with its dynamic
apping of education for example, web 2.0 as event also opens up the question
of the event itself: when and where is it?

In this issue of FCJ, Web 2.0: before, during and after the event, we are as
much interested in opening up a space for thinking how networked events
might look, feel and impart themselves as we are in adding to critical
thinking about particular web 2.0 phenomena. We want to put forward a
proposition that goes something like this: web to the nth dimension could be
a contemporary and collective movement, an event in research and thought
creation, and web 2.0 might just be a version, one extended duration within
that larger movement. By this, we mean that critical thinking, researching
and writing about networks has entered the space and time of a phenomenal,
explosive and singular event, web to the 'n'. We want to think with/in this
milieu. Web 2.0 may only be part of that broader movement in thought but it
certainly presents an opportunity, perhaps a vital and critical one, to both
grasp, and pause during, the event that is networked thinking. Thinking
right now about web 2.0, thinking about it in critical and inventive ways,
as the essays published in this issue do, is part of participating with this
broader event—and of thinking networked events beyond the buzz of the
immediacy of new apps, social media or service platforms.

http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue14/

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Forthcoming Issues of FCJ: November, 2009—Remix; early 2010—Counterplay

-- 
"Take me to the operator, I want to ask some questions" - Barbara
Morgenstern

"A traveller, who has lost his way, should not ask, Where am I? What he
really wants to know is, Where are the other places" - Alfred North
Whitehead

"I thought I had reached port; but I seemed to be cast back again into the
open sea" (Deleuze and Guattari, after Leibniz)

Andrew Murphie - Associate Professor
School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales,
Sydney, Australia, 2052
Editor - The Fibreculture Journal http://journal.fibreculture.org/>
web:
http://www.andrewmurphie.org/
http://www.andrewmurphie.org/blog/
http://www.last.fm/user/andersand/
http://researchhub.cofa.unsw.edu.au/ccap/

fax:612 93856812 tlf:612 93855548 email: a.murphie at unsw.edu.au
room 311H, Webster Building
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