Post your two summaries of McNeill & Zeurn’s Introduction to Online Lives 2.0 and Anil Dash’s “The Lost Infrastructure of Social Media” as a single 500 word comment made to this blog post. Since we covered two readings this past Thursday, you have until this Thursday’s class to get these posted for full credit.
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McNeill and Zuern are both contributing authors to the âIntroduction of Online Lives 2.0,â which is about the Web 2.0 as we know it today in the 21st Century. Web 1.0 is defined and described as the ânew media,â known as the early web engines. Web 1.0 have the characteristics of being a âread only web, information sharing, connecting information, â all about static content, one way publishing (one way communication)â (LinkedIn Corporation © 2018) An example of Web 1.0 technology would be a personal website. Web 2.0 is defined as ânew new media,â an advancement of web 1.0. Web 2.0 is the social web, the âread and write web,â interaction, connecting with people. It is more about a two way communication through social networking, blogging and tagging.â (LinkedIn Corporation © 2018). An example of web 2.0 is Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix. McNeill and Zuern, with the comparison of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 are conveying the message that these technologies that were surrounded by changes, as we continue to change them- which refers back to Kittlerâs logic of escalation. Anil Dash in his work âThe Lost Infrastructure of Social Media,â speaks about the âopen featuresâ back then in comparison with now. In the beginning of his reading, it says âBut many of these open features have either disappeared or exist only in proprietary versions on closed platforms today, which means they only work between sites that use the same tools to publish.â The features of which he refers to are: publishing, search engines, commentary, likes and signals, friend list, APIâs {& etc.}. To define the following in relation to technology and the infrastructure of social media as we know it today:
1. Publishing: creating content that is available online, as in a blog.
2. Search Engines: Searching things that are so much more than what is initially searched for already. To put this in easier terms, if you were to search for something on the web with the Web 1.0 technology, you would be strictly given results associated with that search. Nowadays, with Web 2.0 technology such as Google, there are hundreds and hundreds of results for one topic searched, and usually hundreds more advertisements associated with it.
3. Commentary: Written interactions published online in response to other comments, or a blog post published on the same platform.
4. âLikesâ and Signals: Improvements and âvotingâ for things that the user dislikes and likes. For example, Instagram has the heart, representing a response of liking someoneâs post.
5. Friend-List: A tracking of the friends/people kept on a certain list. For example, Facebook devised a separate app, called Messenger with a given set of the friends listed on Facebook to help users connect more and better.
6. APIâs: Application Programming Interfaces; which are tools and apps built to interact with other platforms and services. The above example listed for âfriends-listâ with the app Messenger can apply here. Another example is the app WhatsApp, which is again created by Facebook for better interaction. The difference is that WhatsApp is not completely tied to Facebook as Messenger is; you do not need a Facebook account to use WhatsApp, which is why it is an API.
Anil Dash, Laurie McNeill, and John David Zuern all contribute to the commentary about web 1.0 and web 2.0. Web 1.0 is important for us to understand as a fundamental basis, and web 2.0 is the advancement of that fundamental basis. It is important to recognize them separately, and then together as they make up a whole of what web we are experiencing today. Separately, we can say that web 1.0 needs to be understood for the advancements to further develop web 2.0 as a whole.
Online Lives 2.0
In 2003, a group of scholars collaborated to showcase the new media of that era by writing about web cams, blogs, webpages, etc. in Biography magazine. In 2015, Laurie McNeill and John David Zuern wrote âOnline Lives 2.0â to essentially give an update on the new media of the modern era and how it is impacting their own online and real lives as well as those of others. Dr. McNeill is an English professor at the University of British Columbia; Dr. Zuern is also an English professor, teaching at the University of Hawaii. They wanted to illustrate how internet technologies have changed how we tell our stories and othersâ stories, as well as how 2.0 has impacted our consciousness.
They draw clear distinctions between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The characteristics of Web 1.0 are as follows: It is passive, readable, one-way, static, unchanging, individual, curated, portal-based, more controllable, server-based, centralized, and provided total anonymity. One could have an identity online that was completely separate from his or her real-life persona. Results of a 1.0 search would always be the same because it relied only the data being sought, not the person searching. The characteristics of Web 2.0 are as follows: It is active, writeable, dynamic, tailored or customized to individual tastes, social, a place for social sharing and knowledge sharing, dispersed, two-way, interactive, less controllable, and organized around search. Results of a 2.0 search will be different depending on the person searching. 2.0 is brought to us by content providers only, and they control the content now. And of course, there is no longer any anonymity in Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 blurs the lines between our personal and public lives, online and offline. Like it or not, our online and offline identities are merged now because of the way 2.0 data is shared, stored, tagged, monitored, etc. The big technology companies understand that to make the most money, they need to target their audiences with advertising. It doesnât serve them to deliver search results with the most useful information first; they pay to have the most profitable information show up first in the hopes that we will click.
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The Lost Infrastructure of Social Media
Anil Dash is a blogger and technology consultant. In 2016, he wrote a very interesting article entitled, âThe Lost Infrastructure of Social Mediaâ which was featured on Medium.com. Medium is a blogging-based site dedicated to a mixture of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 technologies. In monetizes some content in order to help the contributors make money, but its purpose is to provide a closed publishing platform that highlights 1.0 features that are still valuable in a 2.0 world.
When I think of infrastructure, I think of roads, bridges, the power of a city, e.g. Itâs literally the fundamental basis upon which a society can build and operate. So in the same way, the infrastructure behind Web 2.0 technology is its foundation, and it stems from 1.0 technologies and innovations. And Mr. Dash is mourning the way online communication media has become consolidated, and therefore, less individual and controllable.
He discusses how technologies of ten years ago were open and that kind of infrastructure lent itself to creativity, freedom, competition, and individual control. Once the large tech companies recognized the monetary value in obtaining control over mass social media, the open infrastructure either disappeared or was absorbed by the large companies. He talks about online publishing (creating content online), search, comments (written interaction in response to content), likes or favorites, updates (lets people know when youâve published content), identity, friend lists, following, syndication, API (app programming interfaces), metadata (user generated data about data), discovery and tagging, analytics (used to understand usersâ habits and wants), advertising, aggregation (pulling data together), and time shifting and reading (gathering content while youâre offline for your consumption later).
There are affordances and constraints to all technology and we should bear them in mind. For example, metadata is a great tool- it can tag information like locations in photos. This can be useful and fun, but also dangerous if in the wrong hands. We also talked about APIs. APIs are interfaces that allow you to build tools that interact with other services. These are extremely helpful to smaller companies to be able to save money and launch their products more quickly, but using APIs from the large tech companies means that the small companies will always be essentially beholden to them since their companyâs infrastructure is based on a proprietary API they do not control.
In the case of all these early infrastructure tools, Dash is making the overall argument that these tools were designed to help the users connect and create, and the goal in those days was not just to make money. He suggests that we might consider reincorporating some of the old infrastructure styles to maybe make the new technologies better. He stresses that just because the current tech/infrastructure of today has flourished and made lots of money, it doesnât mean that it is in itself new technology, nor that it is necessarily an improvement from the old days (things arenât necessarily whiggish).
Laurie McNeill is an English professor and is the Acting Chair of First Year Programs of Arts at the University of British Columbia. McNeill focuses her ideas on social actions of digital life narratives and biographies. John David Zuern is also an English professor at the University of Hawaiâi at MÄnoa as well as a coeditor of Biography. His work also includes online identities. Together, McNeill and Zuern contributed to âOnline lives 2.0: Introductionâ. This work elaborated on oneâs online identity in which one will create stories about themselves. In previous class readings and discussions as well as in this reading, both writers understood that the web has two parts, as its development over time. The factions of the web is know as Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.
Web 1.0 was the pioneer of the internet. In this cyber world, users viewed this area as a different place. This region was was not apart of normal life. This was a zone for a passive, centralized, individual yet universal place. Users were able to use the internet for an online identity which was different from their personal identity. Users can create various connections through social interaction blogs for expressional freedom. Online privacy was more vibrant. For example, during Web 1.0âs era using search engines, such as Google, two searches will ultimately bring up the same result. Unlike todayâs internet, this version was not tailored to individual needs. Web 1.0 lacks the algorithm used in Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 became a place of interactive, dynamic, social cloud in which new media became more advanced. In this version, users can use the web for a two interaction whether using social media, torrents and overall remaining in constant interaction with others. Today, Google uses search information of an individual to tailor ideas and data with advertising sponsorship. These interactions affect how a user thinks, consumes or even the people they are connected to. Web 2.0 is connected to everyday life in which people often limit what they want to share. The lack of privacy is difficult to obtain in todayâs age since the internet ensures information is constantly shared and stored.
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Born on September 5, 1975, Anil Dash is a writer, entrepreneur, and technologist. He research is focused on technology making it related in an ethical way. The website he used to write âThe lost infrastructure of social mediaâ, is Medium.com which is a real-life representation of the mixture of Web 1.0. And Web 2.0. This site allows individuals to present ideas as it is montionerized by peers paid by views for money by javascript. Javascript allows users to be tracked by personal movement collecting data on the length of time users spend on it and if the material was read at all. The site also allows visitors to comment on writing and focus on varies ideas.
Dash key concerns on the various innovations used for online communication. He ensures that some technologies are new or have been upgraded/degraded over time. It is important that users overall understand the changes that have occurred over time. The past is just as important as the advances that may or may not happen. Innovations can also cause some companies to thrive with financial successful whilst other companies may have to âkillâ products.
Dash included sixteen important key points for online communication. The first point was publishing, which allows the creation of content online. The second point is searching in which search engines are built into platforms. Examples such as Webcrawler were explained as a website indexer. The third point includes comments which are a written interaction about the same content in the same platform. The term trolling is often associated with this idea as people can add content that does not contribute to the work’s ideas. Various newspaper sites removed this feature at the cost of losing customers due to the lack of interaction. Alike or favorites opinion is the fourth point in which there is a social approval for the content. The fifth point is known as updates which allow users to know when new content is available. Identity is another key idea for a connection to real self. Just as McNeill and Zuernâs work, it is important that people are allowed a personal identity that connects them to online communication. This makes the material more relatable. The idea of a friend list allows similar ideas to be shared among people one follows. The eighth idea of following relates to current sharing or writing ideas constantly shared with friends. Syndication is another concept know for a subscription to content. This is often viewed as an RSS. Another key point is API known as Application Programming Interfaces. These are built tools and applications used by other platforms. One example includes Tinder being owned by Facebook. Facebook is in charge of Tinderâs API, thus shutting off the platform for a day. The next concept known as metadata is a user-generated content about content. These layers of data allow peopleâs data to give information about other data needed by a platform for multiple reasons.Discovery and Tagging are also important in social interaction in which data can be added to the context. In addition, analytics is known as traffic brings engagement between various users. Advertising is ultimately used for payment of marketing. To bring the material together, it is important not to forget
Aggregation in the process. And last but not least time shifting and reading has a allow content to be used when internet access is unavailable. Users would have to download content to view ideas.
Again, these multiple notions can shift and alter over time because technology is constantly changing. Dash makes it clear that these ideas are a mixture of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. This is why it is important to value the modifications in technology.
In 2015, Laurie McNeill and John Zuern published Online Lives 2.0, this article touches up on the ideas expressed in the article, Online Lives. McNeill and Zuern analyze the era in new media known as, web 2.0, where we as a society grew past blogs, online diaries, and other forms of self- representation over computers and now developed software applications to take that self-representation to new heights. While web 1.0 was established during the mid 1990s and the early part of the century, many of the mediums on the world wide web were set in stone and communication between the creator and readers was not as prominent. Fast forward a few years later and the world witness the social media storm and everyone creates profiles on these platforms. This is web 2.0, the era of new media where the application invites social interaction among its members, develops their own database about its members, and the appearance constantly change through updates. YouTube is a perfect example of a web 2.0 website, people who use it end up seeing recommended videos and content creatorsâ real lives merge with their online personas when they start to see an increase in fame and fortune. McNeill and Zuern mark this as the key difference between web 1.0 and web 2.0. Companies have severed the boundaries between real life and online personas. Web 2.0 has created business opportunities to profit of their members through putting ads on their videos or timelines and keep them engaging with their application for long periods of time.
This business exploit goes hand in hand with Anil Dashâs âThe Lost Infrastructure of Social Mediaâ where discusses how over a decade our personal information has been used to rake in money for these companies that own these social media websites. He created a list of features that define Web 2.0 websites and how companies use them to their advantage. I will use YouTube as an example to define these features.
Publishing: Content creatorsâ can upload their videos on the website and own rights to their own content.
Search engine: YouTube has their own algorithm and search engine that works together to place a video that is family friendly and earn them more money by ads and viewers.
Comment: Content creatorsâ and subscribers can interact in the comment section and the creatorsâ can see what the subscribers want to see.
Like or Favorite: Members can like a video and save it under their favorites.
Syndication: Members can subscribe to other content creatorsâ
Identity: YouTube have access to your email and create a database based off the videos you watched.
A.P. Iâs (Application Programming Interfaces) and Timeshifting: YouTube red and YouTube TV are monthly paying services that allow members to skip adds and watch some of their favorite TV shows. YouTube is interacting with many film companies and television companies with these services. YouTube Red along with YouTube music allows you to still play videos while youâre not on their applications, go to other applications, and even watch the videos offline.
Discover and Tagging: When you subscribe to a YouTuber it will suggest other YouTubers to subscribe to and the description under their videos will have tags such as, category and related topics.
Online Lives 2.0
Laurie McNiel received her PhD in English at the University of British Columbia. She teaches English and the Coordinated Arts program which has courses like autobiography studies, archival studies and academic writing. Her research is currently focusing on digital life narratives that includes blogs and social networking sites. John Zuern holds a BA in English from Moorhead State University, a MA in Comparative Literature, MA in English from the University of Texas-Austin and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas-Austin. Literary criticism and theory, fiction, life writing, and electronic literature is what his writing and teachings focus on. Both McNiel and Zuern worked on an essay called Online Lives 2.0. This was a special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. In Online Lives 2.0, it talks about the online presence and how it has changed us. They also mention web 2.0 and discuss the boundaries of online and offline as well as public and private space on the web. With web 2.0, the websites have become more responsive and more interactive. And even though with web 2.0 we can do many new exciting things, there is always a price to pay. Unfortunately with web 2.0, we donât have control over it as we think we do. It is controlled by different technologies that are made by companies who control its features. Our online lives are exposed to everything and everyone every day. They discuss how any person can be anyone on online and no one would be able to tell the difference. You can make fake profiles and no one would know that it is fake. There is also security that we constantly worry about. Anyone can use your information for bad intentions and once you post something online, it stays there for the world to see forever. You can get hacked and have your information be exposed to everyone. As a consequence of making technology more advanced, web 2.0 is blurring âthe boundaries between online and offline life and as a consequence boundaries between private and public life.â
The Lost Infrastructure of Social Media
Anil Dash is a blogger, activist, entrepreneur and technologist. He never graduated from college but accomplished a lot of great things. He âwas an advisor to the Obama White Houseâs Office of Digital Strategy, and today advices major startups and non-profits including Medium and DonorsChoose.â His main focus is making tech more humane and ethical. He is currently the CEO of Fog Creek Software. In his article âThe Lost infrastructure of Social Media,â he talks about the different features that are presented in social media. The key features he talks about are publishing, search, comments, responses, likes/favorites, updates, identity, friend lists, following, syndication, API, metadata, discovery and tagging, analytics, advertising, aggregation, time shifting and reading. Publishing refers to making and creating information online on the web. Search is when you want to look up for something in particular. Search engines allow you to input your search and it will look through the databases and return what you are looking for. Comments allow people to write and post what is it they want to share. Once posted, anyone can view it. If anyone wanted to interact with one another they would just leave a response. Likes and favorites is something that hasnât been around for a long time. It is part of social media and means that someone has liked or approved what you have posted. Updates allow you to see and keep up-to-date with new published content. Identity is a way to verify who you are when signing in to a social network. It is connected to who you are. Friend list is a way that shows you who is following you and who are following. With following you can stay up-to-date with new published content from those who you follow. Syndication is what allowed you to keep up-to-date with content by subscribing to it. API stands for Application Programming Interface and it gives you the ability to create different tools and apps that can be used on different platforms or services. Metadata is a set of data or layers of data that provide information about other data. Discovering and tagging with the help of metadata discovers and retrieves content for people. Analytics will gather input from searches that users make to try to understand the usersâ needs. Advertising is done with the ads that appear on a website of similar things that we have searched for. Many companies use advertising to try to sell their products. With aggregation, you can get your updates all in one place thanks to tools like RSS and pocket. Time shifting and reading is somewhat similar to aggregation. It allows you to collect data and downloading it to a device where you can later view it. We may think that social media and any new social technologies are new, but the truth is it’s not new. Weâve seen it before only now there are new features being presented which make it feel new and advanced.
McNeill and Zuern introduce the work of ” introduction of Online Lives 2.0″, both of them discussed how web 1.0 has taken a step further and transformed into web 2.0. Considering web 1.0 has turned old media to new media, web 2.0 becomes the “new new media” in this era. From the fundamentals of web 1.0, our online identity are anonymous; it formulates our online web data with only the information transmission part. Web 1.0 defines in a single direction of information data sharing. However, web 2.0 has converted the web 1.0 into a brand new experience. McNeill and Zuern drew the difference from web 1.0 as defined as passive, static, universal, server-based, centralized, by arranging around a portal, it transmits one way, and it implies the meaning of control. From the side of web 2.0, we have more control towards our online identity. By connecting with web 2.0, it provides an active, writable, dispersed, dynamic tailor. It refines itself with the basic information and transforms with your personalities and social knowledge. Web 2.0 is all around the cloud, which means it can personalize your data with a better correspondence. For instance, the advertisements are more advanced these days. It switches automatically based on your shopping interest. Videos on Youtube are even smarter than ever before, it alters the content and categorizes it whenever you liked a certain content of videos. Google search engine is the essential part that plays around the era of web 2.0, the search engine provides different answers to one and other depends on the search history, which is privacy invading under some aspects. McNeill and Zuern argue that web 2.0 are the boundaries of online and offline life. With such particular web experience, “The lost of Infrastructure of Social Media” by Anil Dash compares the difference between web 1.0 and web 2.0. Anil Dash expresses which the consolidation of online meditation has changed over a decade; he is the guy whose focus base on publishing online with blogs. He mentions that our search engine built into social platforms, all kinds of the content providers use their advantages of providing different types of search results to achieve higher profits for them, prioritizes unrelated content compared to the search results as advertisements. Comments sections have become more abusive. From the previous of comment section, comments are undeveloped, and it becomes much more abusive with web 2.0. Our likes and favorites become the social approvals of web 2.0. Mega data among web 2.0 is the definition of web 2.0; it helps the user to discover data with the previous result. Like I talked before, web 2.0 saves your previous search results to present more reasonable and personalized search results in the future. Syndication has form a way of the aggregation in web 2.0. Aggregation is the term which combines information under the same application platform to provide more specific content to the user. As a result, Anil Dash informs us that the past technologies transform over a period of time.
In Online Lives 2.0 Laurie McNeil and John David Zuern talk about how web 2.0 and how web 1.0 differ from each other. McNeil and Zuern say that web 1.0 is more passive, static, and you have more control over it. web 1.0 was simple it didnât change much, it stayed in one place and people had control of things. Web 2.0 is cloud based, tailored, organized around search, dynamic, and you generally have less control on whatâs going on. In web 2.0 which is today, you can access it from just about anywhere and it changes all the time. Web 2.0 is tailored to each individual who uses it, for example, it uses your searches to keep track of what you like and then show you them in ads on your screen. Another thing about web 2.0 is that once you put something on there it stays there forever even if you think you got rid of it, itâll still be there somewhere and thatâs why we have little control of whatâs going on web 2.0. during web 1.0 we could create an online identity, and no one could know who you really were, and it established a sense of privacy. During web 2.0 everything you do and post someone knows about it and is willing to sell it to anyone who asks for it for some profit. This removes the whole privacy boundary and almost entirely blends your public and private life together.
In Anil Dashâs The lost infrastructure of social media he talks about how sad he feels toward the direction of communication media over the past ten years. Dash mainly talks about publishing, search, comments, like or favorites, friend list, and identity. Publishing allowed any content creators to create things like articles and videos. Search allows people to look for whatever theyâre looking for and because of web 2.0 your searches will dictate which ads get tailored toward you. Comments allow people to express their option and even these can be used in harmful ways, so some companies get rid of commenting all together or disable the ability to make them. Likes and favorites allow people to show that they like what the content creator is putting out and is relatively new since the past decade. Friend list allows people to add others to a list that they consider a friend and even things like Xbox Live have taken things like this further by adding recommended friends based on what friends you have. Identity allows people to create a sense of self online but because of web 2.0 your online life and your real life become blended in a way and anyone who has the money and will can find out anything about you. Dash talks about aggregation and time shifting, when all the options are present but too little(aggregation) ânewâ innovations that arenât so new just reused. We learn our past to create better technologies for today
Laurie McNeill is an Instructor in the Department of English, and Acting Chair at the University of British Columbia. John David Zuern is Associate Professor of English at the University of Hawaiâi at MÄnoa and co-editor of the Biography. In the 2003 Biography “Online Lives,” the creditors ponder progressions and check new advancements in Internet-based online/anecdotal generation since the coming of Web 2.0. The bibliography received many supporters who serialized concerns in their writings about a disintegrating open/private life on the web. Madeleine Sorapure, for instance, shared a few bloggers’ “disclaimers” or “principles” that endeavored to the web and disconnected lives situation. The author’s plot repeating topics in the expositions in Online Lives 2.0, which join the converging of open and private life, online self-education, the financial measurements of online self-introduction, and the separating and misrepresentation of lives in web-based social networking, and they investigate the ramifications of these issues for online/history contemplates. Laurie’s own particular commitment opened with her feeling of inconvenience about perusing these extremely person, regularly exceptionally quotidian accounts, despite the fact that she remembered they were planned for a readership. Verbal confrontations about online practice remained in for bigger, implicit social and social worries about what ought to be stated, and by whom, in general of Web 2.0.
Anil Dash is an essayist, business visionary, and technologist. His inquiry is centered around innovation making it related in a moral way. The site he used to express “The lost framework of web-based social networking”, is Medium.com which is a genuine portrayal of the blend of Web 1.0. And Furthermore, Web 2.0. This site enables people to display thoughts as it is containerized by peers paid by sees for cash by javascript. JavaScript enables clients to be followed by individual development gathering information on the time allotment clients spend on it and if the material was perused by any means. The site additionally enables guests to remark on composing and spotlight on differs thoughts.
Dash key worries on the different advancements used for online correspondence. He guarantees that a few innovations are new or have been updated/debased after some time. It is essential that clients generally comprehend the progressions that have happened after some time. The past is similarly as essential as the advances that could happen. Advancements can likewise make a few organizations flourish with budgetary fruitful while different organizations may need to “execute” items. Dash included sixteen essential key focuses for online correspondence.
1. publishing > making and making content on the web
2. Search > search motors worked on platforms. Web crawler. Adds stuff to profit with notice
3. Comments > composed collaboration on same substance in a similar platform. Critique blended with trolling for Newspapers online so they evacuated them and lost clients absence of cooperation
4. Like or Favorites > social endorsement of substance
5. Updates > let others known the new substance
6. identity> associated with genuine self
7.friend list> individuals you take after and tail you
8. Following > forward of sharing or composing of others
9.Syndication > membership to content RSS
10. API> application programming interfaces. Assemble instruments and applications that utilize different platforms or administrations. Fb changed API for tinder. Close it down for a day
11.Metadata > client created content about substance. Layers of information. Find out about individuals. an arrangement of information that depicts and gives information about other data.12.Discovery and Tagging > add to the specific circumstance
13.Analytics >traffic, commitment
14.advertising > paying to advertise
15.aggregation > pull content together RSS
16.Time shifting and reading > manual or set up various stuff to assemble content download to telephone or comp when no web access and read stuff
Jessica L. Roman
ENG 1710
4/25/2018
Laurie McNeill is an English Professor at the University of British Columbia, her research focuses on contemporary autobiographical folk narratives such as diaries. John David Zuern is an English professor from the University of Hawaiâi, his research focuses on literary criticism and theory, life writing and electronic literature. Zuern is also a co-editor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. Both Zuern and McNeill were co-editors of a special issue of Biography âOnline Lives 2.0â which is a follow up to the 2003 special issue âOnline Livesâ. They are responding to and continuing the discourse of how the new-new media of web 2.0 and its constituents have reorganized our consciousness. Like many of the articles, we have read and discussed thus far Zuern and McNeill are bringing attention to how we change our technology and our technology changes us.
âOnline Lives 2.0â draws very clear differences between web 1.0 and web 2.0. Web 1.0 is passive, static, individual, server based; it is one way and implies more control. Web 2.0 on the other hand is active, writeable, dynamic, tailored, social, dispersed, there is two-way interaction and is organized around searches. Web 1.0 allowed users to create separate lives for themselves that could not necessarily be traced back to them. Web 2.0 does not offer the opacity of its static one-way predecessor. The boundaries of these online lives and real life. It is important as citizens of the highly digital and social age be wary of what we share on the internet, as there are very real consequences and our social media platforms and lives have become commodities.
Directly related to this article is Anil Dashâs âThe Lost Infrastructure of Social Mediaâ, on Medium.com. Medium.com itself lives between the web 1.0 and web 2.0. Anil Dash is an entrepreneur, activist and writer. Dahs is also the CEO of Fog Creek Software. This background allows him unique insights he uses to advocate of a humane, ethical and inclusive tech industry. Dash shares his woes on the consolidation of online communication media. The chart Dashâs provides to demonstrate how technologies have either been made obsolete or absorbed into large corporate entities is a clear monopolization, this is just another way that web 2.0 is less controllable. This corporate control present in web 2.0 can be seen in different facets like the excessive advertisements, the procuring of other companies, sometimes just to absorb or âkillâ their products.
Some of the key items Dash discusses are publishing, search, comments, responses, likes/favorites, updates, identity, friend lists, following, syndication, API (Application programming interface), metadata, discovery and tagging, analytics, advertising, aggregation, time shifting and reading. All of these directly tie into the changes McNeill and Zuern discuss in relation to the way our web has a changed and changes us. Dash aims to illustrate that innovation in online communication are not always actually new and not always better. He encourages us to look to the technologies of the past and to learn from those technologies constraints and affordances.
TO: Professor Dr. Jason W. Ellis
FROM: Ronald C. Hinds
SUBJECT: Living in Cyberspace, Then and Now: Web 1.0 & Web 2.0
DATE: April 26, 2018
A yearning for the good old days is not only a desire based on romanticism but, sometimes, we need to and want to return to a simpler life. The gap, in time, between web 1.0 and web 2.0 is between one score and one decade ago, but the difference between the two is very stark. Social Networking Sites or SNS have spawned a new genre but some prefer 1.0 which they perceive as being a part of a safer and less dangerous digital era. Trolls, the long arm of âBig Brotherâ also known as the National Security Administration or NSA, bad actors, bullies, misogynists, and racists of all stripes all dwell in a quicksand-like environment. Technology has shifted the landscape of our private lives.
Hal Niedzviecki, a Canadian novelist and cultural critic, introduces us to a concrete example of the intrusive way the web can be manipulated by users. Hal Niedzviecki, author of âThe Peep Diaries: How Weâre Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighborsâ – June 1, 2009, introduces the arrival of the age of peep culture and explores its implications for entertainment, society, sex, politics, and everyday life.
I just want to mention for the record that, since this 2009 article, Hal Niedzviecki, in and about May 2017, resigned as an editor of a magazine, âWrite,â over an article defending âCultural Appropriation.â The magazine âWriteâ is devoted to indigenous literature.
. Daniel Gayo-Avello, from the University of Oviedo, Spain, in an article titled, âSocial Media Wonât Free Usâ, tells us it is untrue that the social media âTwitter revolutionâ of the Green Movement of Iran and the âFacebook revolutionâ of Egypt were crucial to organizing âdissentersâ in these two societies. Gayo-Avello continues that âItâs enough for relevant state actors to claim or assert that use of such technology leads to security risks, so that any user might be viewed as a potential dissenter â or even a spyâ. He basically denounces the myth of the power wielded by social media to organize to effect change. Twitter and Facebook are not the vehicles to effect change.
Certainly social media played a role in Iran, Egypt and Tunisia, but for only a minority of the protestors. According to Gayo-Avello, 20,000 protestors had Twitter accounts out of a population of 70 million Iranians. This is not to suggest that social media, in and of itself, was incapable of shifting the socio-political paradigm; its just that the numbers required to satisfy that end simply were not there when held in contrast to the greater numbers which state control over the internet restricted dissenters from ever reaching.
Facebookâs (web 2.0) betrayal by way of Cambridge Analytica, a British data firm, which harvested the personal information of up to 87 million of its users, and Facebookâs apparent disregard for the privacy of its consumers, has âfriendsâ worrying. Can they anticipate where the proverbial next shoe will fall? Remember Mark Zuckerbergâs promise to make the internet, via (Facebook) web 2.0, more open and connected? Did he succeed and at what price? What of Anil Dashâs argument and worry that the web is too insular? I agree with Dash. Some of the companies, like Facebook, are too large. Small startups do not have the financial resources to compete.
Kyle Chayka, a writer living in Brooklyn, who contributes to The New York Times Magazine, New Republic, and BusinessWeek, writes: ââŠ.online communities can feel too large, overwhelming, and too vulnerable to outsiders. Thereâs a new batch of online communities that are modeling some of their core design features after early Web communities in an effort to create more intimate communitiesâ. Lev Grossman writes for the Times magazine and talks about the net âbecoming a hostile, contested territory where private companies, law enforcement, criminals, the military and various international intelligence agencies are engaging in constant low-level cyber warfareâ. Web 2.0 is big, efficient and monetized but not safe. On the other hand the 2.0 web Internet appears to be a much more public place than it was during the days of web 1.0. Anil Dash argues in a piece titled, âRebuilding the Web We Lostâ for even more public places.
One of four bloggers featured, in 2003, on the Public Broadcasting Station (PBS) series Media Matters was Anil Dash. He is an American blogger, entrepreneur and technologist. Dash is a co-founder of âThinkUpâ a company loosely connected with his writing titled, âThe Web We Lostâ. In December 2012, Mr. Dash gave a talk and he made the point that âThe web was an interesting and different place before links got monetized, but by 2007 it was clear that Google had changed the web forever, and for the worse, by corrupting linksâ.
Anil Dash makes a powerful intervention to an argument of the almost demise of blogging. He talks of the drift away of some of bloggingâs related technologies and the rise of new ones which could still be valuable to its infrastructure. The blogosphere shifted from a decentralized entity to a centralized operation but some of the innovations are not really new. What Dash represents in his August 2016, paper titled, âThe Lost Infrastructure of Social Mediaâ, is a mix of web 1.0 and web 2.0.
Dr. Laurie McNeill, from the Department of English at University of British Columbia and author of âIdentity Technologies: Constructing the Self Onlineâ, and John David Zuern, Professor of the English Department at the University of Hawaii, tell us about changes that have occurred and continue to occur in how we use the internet and about what produces new thinking on the nature of life today. McNeill & Zuern collaborate with many writers to produce a thoughtful read out of their contributions. In 2015 Laurie McNeill and Zuern co-edited a special issue of Biography, “Online Lives 2.0”, which follows up on the journal’s 2003 “Online Lives” special issue. Zuernâs writing and teaching focuses on literary criticism and theory, fiction, life writing, and electronic literature. He also directs the Department of English Undergraduate Internship Program.
I like the arguments provided by various contributors who help us in succinct ways to understand different phenomena; for example âcatfishingâ. Catfishing is the phenomenon of internet predators that fabricate online identities and entire social circles to trick people into emotional/romantic relationships (over a long period of time).
It is useful to compare and contrast Web 1.0 with Web 2.0, as I have tried to do below, to draw informed lessons about the vagaries regarding the composition of the web as from these two eras.
Web 1.0 Web 2.0
Passive Active
Readable Writable
Individual service Tailored service
Centralized Organized
Service based Social networking sites (SNS)
Universal Dispersed
Arranged around a portal Organized around search
Hard drive Cloud
Applies more control Mini to maxi networks
I must confess that I do not have a Facebook account because I care not to be public with my personal needs, hopes, aspirations, habits and items which I consume and see no need to provide advertisers with my likes and dislikes, such as would trigger content imposed upon me by means of AI prompted algorithms to custom-direct advertisements and other such announcements. I rather prefer spontaneity and doing my own research but at the same time I will not dictate to those who merge their private online personae with their public personae. I prefer the tangible relationships with my friends as opposed to those engaged in by some who can click a button or a mouse and friend or unfriend people. Meeting friends in a face to face setting also allows me to spot fakers and pick and choose those I wish to hold close to my vest. A genuine, visual, sparkling face to face smile is always warmer than an emoji. I also worry about internet trolls and identity theft. I recognize that it is more and more difficult to do business outside the internet. At best it acts as a middleman or as a go between. At worst its role in online commerce is entirely self-contained and implemented. Web 1.0, in its early days, allowed anonymity and this had many advantages for users to protect their lives from prying eyes. Many public figures use pseudonyms as their public personae for protection. For example former FBI director, James Comey, used another name online which has since been revealed. Anil Dash, in his writing, âThe Web We Lost,â thinks that it is a good idea for regular people to own their own identities by having their own websites instead of being dependent on big sites. They can have better control of their online identities.
McNeill and Zuern have, with their writing, helped along a thought provoking discussion on online lives. They have captured and explained, with examples, the idea of produsage; produsage being the type of user-led content creation that takes place in a variety of on-line environments, open software, and blogosphere. A blog is a web journal usually posted from a personal site or an established site and is the short-form term for âweb log.â
I really like reading the contributions of Anil Dash, Laurie McNeill and John David Zuern.
Reference
Chayka, K. (2014, October). The Great Web 1.0 Revival.
https://gizmodo.com/the-great-web-1-0-revival-1651487835. Retrieved on 18 April, 2018.
Dash, A. (2016). âThe Lost Infrastructure of Social Media. http://anildash.com/ Retrieved on April 19, 2018.
Gayo-Avello, D. (2017). Social Media Wonât Free Us. IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 21, No. 4. Pgs. 42-45.
Grossman, L. (2018, April). The Code War. Special Time edition. Pgs. 48-53.
Maheshwari, S. (2018, April) Data Fallout at Facebook Puts Brands on Full Alert.
New York Times, Business Day Section. Late ed. B1.
McNeill, L. & Zuern, J. D. (2015). Online lives 2.0: introduction. Biography, 38(2), v-xlv. Retrieved on April 19, 2018 from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/589981
Niedzviecki, H. The Peep Diaries: How weâre learning to Love Watching ourselves and our Neighbors.
https://www.amazon.com/Peep-Diaries-Learning-Ourselves…/dp/0872864995. Retrieved on 22 April, 2018.
Keywords: algorithms, precarization, produsage
Dr. Laurie McNeill is a senior instructor at University of British Columbia and co-editor of âOnline Lives 2.0,â collaborated with Dr. John David Zuern who is a professor at University of Hawaii in the department of English. âOnline Lives 2.0â is a special issue in the journal âBiography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly,â which Zuern is the co-editor for. The special issue discusses how technology change us as we change technology, relatable to Kittlerâs logic of escalation. It discusses Web 1.0 which is the new media that can be described as passive, universal, individual, server-based, centralized, arranged around a portal but most importantly implies one-way control. It also talks about Web 2.0 in contrast to Web 1.0, or new new media, described as active, dynamic, tailored, social, social knowledge, cloud, organized around search, and two-way interactive with less control on behalf of the user. During the new media era or Web 1.0 era, it was possible for a user to have a separate online and offline identity whereas the 2.0 era seems to have no boundaries between the life of a user online and offline due to the nature of having the contents tailored to the users, usually to be able to sell advertisements. As technology continues to develop, the users seem to gain less control over it, surrendering our control to the creators of the applications that we use.
Anil Dash is a blogger on the Medium, a technologist and entrepreneur. In Dashâs âThe Lost Infrastructure of Social Media,â he is also talking about old and new media, which he illustrates with a table labeled âthenâ and ânowâ of early and new ways of blogging. Dash focuses on explaining the feature abilities such as publishing, search, comments, responses, likes, favorites, updates, identity, friendlist, following, syndication, API, metadata, discovery and tagging, analytics, advertising, aggregation, time shifting and reading. A feature such as commenting was uncommon in the early era of media, but nobody could have suspected how much we abuse it nowadays. (Dash, 2016) Like or favorites shows approval of a content, updates allow other users know once you update a content. Identity is persistent across different platforms, and a way of tracking users who follow you would be through Friendlist. Following helps to keep up in sharing of other userâs contents, syndication allows you to subscribe to it. API or application programming interfaces allows the user to build tools and applications that can be used to interact with other platforms. Metadata is user generated content about content, which can be good in a way that the content that be tailored to you but bad because all that data can figure out lots of things about the user whether they like it or not. Something related to metadata would be discovery in tagging which helps users to find related content. Analytics is the engagement, user profiles, ads, ad networks, and aggregation pulls the contents together. Time shifting and reading can help the user to manually gather the content they want to see during their own time. As discussed in class, the ânewâ innovations in social technology are not really new, but by learning from the past has been able to come up with better ways to use technology today.
Laurie McNeill and John David Zuern collaborated to write the, âOnline lives 2.0â where they looked at how the online identities are located. Technologies are trying to change the population. Technologies draw discussions with web 1.0 which than identify with static, individual, server based, centralized Wide World Web. People could build any identity, and nobody would be aware in web 1.0. In web 2.0 it is now much easier to find someoneâs identity. The following terms were discussed in referenced to web 2.0: active, vatable, dynamic, tailored, social, social knowledge, different clouds, disburse, organized around search, two ways interactive, less control over certain technologies. In other words, opposite of web 1.0.
During web 1.0 one could create 1.0 identity. The interaction could only work in one way, where else in in web 2.0 you have a two-way interaction. In addition, web 2.0 there was the ability to expose oneâs identity, in comparison web 1.0 you had the ability to create an identity that you could own and become that someone you just created but in reality, that was not you in real live.
Anil Dash is a blogger, entrepreneur and technology expert. In Dashsâ passage titled, âThe Lost Infrastructure of Social Mediaâ he discussed the new and old media. Medium.com is a mis of both 1.0 and 2.0 structure. Every user can write on it and also make money of it. Dash in his writing sounds upset and down about the consolidation about the new media communication for the last decade. The following terms were discussed in class from Dashâs writing. He mentions publishing as creating something online. Search engine as trolling contents that are thrown in the platform. Comments are written interactions to written content. Likes and favorites meaning social signals of approval of content. Updates were also analyzed. Moreover, identity which is persistent identity across platforms. Friends that are in your platform that connect with you, then you followers who keep up to date of sharing of others. Syndication which allows the user to subscribe to something. API which is an application programming interfaces. Metadata which allows its users to generate content about content. Analytics is traffic or engagement advertising. The aggregation which is pulling things together in order to have content al in one place. Then we discussed, time shifting and reading which lets us gather content where the internet is not available. Lastly, we glanced at innovations which are not necessary. We can all learn so much from the past technologies. We just all keep in mind that without a fundament a house will not be able to be build up. Just like web 1.0 is a fundament of web 2.0. Something had to be created in order for another think to evolve and work someway.
From todayâs class, I have learned the terms that I have seen before in a different context. The context that I did not really perceive those terms in. It is good to be opened to new things, as mentioned in previous readings. We have to connect, perceive and share our knowledge.
Laurie McNeill and John David Zuern created âonline Live 2.0: Introductionâ to simple give an updates about the impact that the new media has given to the online live and real live of people at the moment. They called the new online world 2.0 since it was at the moment the new and more sophisticated version of the 1.0 with the necessary intake of the 1.0 ethic. 2.0 blended all the aspects of our life in one place.
—–
Anil Dash is a blogger and she wrote âThe Lost Infrastructure of Social Mediaâ. In this blog she talks about the new door of communication and freedom of speech was open a decade ago when technology was getting networking. We have obtained so many different access due to technology that without it we wonât have it as fast and affordable. Dash blog âThe Lost Infrastructure of Social Mediaâ was posted on the website Medium.com. This website is the perfect blend of web 1.0 and web 2.0 since it following the structure of the one web with the ethic of the second web.
McNeill, L. & Zuern, J. D. (2015). Online lives 2.0: introduction.
Dr. Laurie McNeill
University of British Columbia, PhD (https://english.ubc.ca/persons/laurie-mcneill/) âI earned my PhD from the Department of English at UBC, and joined the faculty in 2012. My research has focused on contemporary instances of âfolk genresâ of autobiography, such as the diary and the obituary. Rhetorical genre theories have helped me frame questions about access and agency in self-representations, and think about how consumers and producers recognize auto/biography, in its various forms, as the way to respond to contemporary cultural situations. My current research examines digital life narratives, including blogs and social networking sites; with John Zuern, I am co-editor of Online Lives 2.0, a special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (2015).â
John David Zuern (http://english.hawaii.edu/faculty/john-zuern/) âMy writing and teaching focuses on literary criticism and theory, fiction, life writing, and electronic literature. With my colleagues Cynthia Franklin and Craig Howes, I co-edit the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. In 2015 Laurie McNeill and I co-edited a special issue of Biography, “Online Lives 2.0,” which follows up on the journal’s 2003 “Online Lives” special issue. I also direct the Department of English Undergraduate Internship Program. My recent publications include a forthcoming article in Comparative Literature, chapter in The Profiling Handbook (2015), a chapter on electronic poetry in Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era (2013), an article on the life writing of Louis Althusser in Life Writing (2011), and a critical history of the networking company Cisco Systems in the volume Cultural Critique and the Global Corporation (Indiana UP, 2010). In 2012 I was honored to receive the University of Hawaiâi Regents Medal for Excellence in Teaching.â
Lauries McNeil and John David respond to Smithâs question âmultitasking, search trial, network sociality, are all effect of human, machine ensemble exchanges that structures everyday life onto developing contrived to what extent do these phenomenon affect the organization of consciousness. How does it affect the way we think. We know from our readon of Ong, Mazlish and, McLuhan that these technologies continued to change us as we conitre to change them, according to Kittler logical of exploration. They draw distinction between Web 1.0 which they make up of list. Passive, readable, universal, individual, curated, server, centralized, portal, one way, more control. And they compare that to web 2.0. Itâs active, writable, dynamic, taylored, social, contain social knowledge of the cloud, dispersed, it involves search, two way interactive communication and less control. During the web 1.0 era onecan conciale make an online identity distinct form ones real life identity, but they argue that web 2.0 is glorifying the boundaries between online and offline. There are boundaries between private and public. Al agre part of theis lost control has to do with the shift of one to many Web 1.0 one to many Web 2.0 models and in the latter virtue place on sharing.
Web 1.0
Hmtl static
Home page
portal/directions
Web 2.0
Cms/dynamic
Blog
Sharing
Social Networks
Dash, A. (2016, Aug. 10). The lost infrastructure of social media
Anil Dash was born on September 5, 1975. He is an American blogger. He is an entrepreneur. Last but not least, he is a technologist.
Accodirng to wikipedia, âPreviously an independent technology consultant and new media developer for the Village Voice, Dash was the first employee of Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox. He served as its Vice President and Chief Evangelist until moving to Expert Labs. He was the director of Expert Labs, a “Government 2.0 initiative that aims to connect United States government projects with citizens who want to become more involved in the political discussion”
âHe is a partner at ACTIVATE.com, a “next generation strategy consulting firm” that focuses on media and technology.â
âDash is co-founder and CEO of ThinkUp, an app that offers users advice on their social network profiles. The company is loosely connected to Dash’s writing about “The Web We Lost” and to the IndieWeb, the idea that “regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity.”
In âThe lost infrastructure of social mediaâ Anil Dash argues that there was a commence of the consolidation of media over the last decade. He focuses on technology such as publishing, search, comment, responses, liking or favoriting, updating, following, sindication, (apl) application program inter facing, content about context, meta-data–layers of data, analytics, discovery, advertising, aggregation
organization and time shifting and reading. The key takeaway is that so called innovations occurring online tech isnât necessary new, itâs just the file of otiona has contracted for a variety of reason including profitability planned obsolescence, etc. We can still learn from the oast to learn better ways to use tech today.
Many affordances in social media today find their beginning in disused technologies
Reference
Wikipedia contributors. (2018, March 8). Anil Dash. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 00:50, May 29, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anil_Dash&oldid=829352754