It is now the last week of LIBR 559M, the week of summer term which marks the end of the academic year, which in the bigger scheme of things means September is just around the corner. Not too early, in fact, to start thinking about 2012. For those who follow such things, 2012 is the year that the Mayan long count ends, which by some accounts foretells the end of the world. But more relevantly for this class, 2012 – specifically October 1, 2012 – marks the end of Web 2.0.
Or maybe not. What October 1, 2012 really marks is the date that the tech commentator Christopher Mims (quoted by John Naughton) predicts that the now-declining frequency of appearances of the term “Web 2.0” in Google searches will reach zero. It might be more accurate to say, not so much that this is the end of Web 2.0 the technology, but of Web 2.0 the buzzword. What is certain that there will still be tools and services that will allow people to create and share content on-line, and people will be meeting and forming communities, though whether they will even be calling what they do social networking – or calling the tools that they are using social media – is an open question.
One of the affordances – or perhaps even obligations – of a course like this is the opportunity for each student to wrestle with the questions about the lasting utility or value of the social media we have been studying (the question “are social media a fad?” is as foundational to this course as, say, “what is art?” might be to another).
Is Web 2.0 a buzzword? Almost beyond question. The shoulders of the information superhighway are littered with discarded pieces of eJargon (or do I mean iJargon? it all starts to run together after a while). But also indisputably, there is something, however fuzzy, hidden behind the term, whether it’s AJAX programming that lets your browser run software “in the cloud” or a participatory ethic that lets the user control the transaction. Perhaps, as Naughton muses, it “is simply to say that it’s ‘the web done properly’.”
Are social media a fad? Perhaps, if only to the extent that some Web 2.0 services and products may have promised more than they ultimately delivered, that many people signed up for services following the example of friends or family or celebrities, only to discard them after awhile, like hula hoops and pet rocks. Think of how many people you know started a blog only to abandon it after a few posts, or signed up for a social networking site only to become bored with it and stop using it. Other services have shown tremendous staying power: Wikipedia, You Tube, Flickr, just to name a few.
And what about Library 2.0? Individually, there have been libraries that have had successful ventures into social media that reengaged their patrons and sparked the imagination of the surrounding community. However, I’m inclined to think that if libraries are a dying institution, Library 2.0 as a programme is not going to save them, and if libraries are thriving (and many of them actually seem to be), Library 2.0 can’t take the credit. I say this not least of all because the libraries that I visit on a regular basis, both public and academic, are such bustling places exactly because they are valued physical (not virtual) spaces.
In this course I’ve read and watched a fair number of tech pundits and futurists, so I am now inspired to take my turn and pull out my own doubtlessly unreliable crystal ball. (After all, participation is the name of the game, n’est ce pas?) I predict that the future growth of the social web is going to be constrained at over time by diminishing returns. At some point (soon) most everyone who wants a networked computer in the “have” nations will have one. This rapidly becoming true for mobile telephones, even in much of the developing world, and a similar saturation with smart phones will follow. There is also a limit to how many meaningful connections one person can have with other people, even on line – there is even a limit to the number of meaningless ones! Meanwhile, the number of connections between machines will continue to increase – resulting in a state of hyperconnectivity. Much of the communication between these devices will be simple data, telemetry and the like, but increasingly machines will also autonomously query each other for information with semantic content. These transactions ultimately will be very complex, not to the point envisioned by some of the more utopian visions of the Semantic Web, but complex enough to challenge some of our current notions about information and agency. Like the waves of technology that preceded it, this wave will make some people a lot of money. It will be accompanied with a healthy dollop of hype, some of it undeserved, and, it will be accompanied by its own buzzwords, some of which will be sillier than others. And it will leave librarians and other information professionals struggling for a while, trying to make sense of how the new technologies will affect our institutions, but we will ultimately figure it out, in no small part because of the experiences we will have had with Web 2.0 and all the other technologies we’ve had to master before it. We will understand the changing information needs of our users and will learn how to help them (and their machines). We quite possibly will continue to read books. And at the end we will be … the hyperconnected librarian?
References
John C. Abell (2008). The end of Web 2.0. Wired Magazine. Retrieved 16 Aug 2011.
Cisco Systems (2011). Entering the Zettabyte Era. Retrieved 16 Aug 2011.
David Chartier (2008). No off switch: “Hyperconnectivity” on the rise. Ars Technica. Retrieved 16 Aug 2011.
John Naughton (2011). The death of Web 2.0 is nigh. The Observer / guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 16 Aug 2011