:MeetPi

I was paying for parking the other day. As I fed the meter card into the machine, the mechanical feeder failed to grab the card properly and then wouldn’t accept it. A human operator might have offered a small, virtually subconscious apology for their inept fumbling of the card. But not the machine. It rebuked me with a sterile “Card not inserted correctly” message.

This, of course, is not the machine’s fault. Someone programmed it to say that, someone who decided that the machine, with all of maybe fifty years of technological innovation (I’m being generous) is less likely to be at fault than the human being. This, despite the tens or hundreds of millions of years of evolution that quite plausibly makes the average two year old more dexterous than the ludicrously crude mechanics of a parking meter.

It’s not the parking machine maker’s fault, either. He or she is playing out a role as part of a machine design mentality that treats the human operator as a mindless dupe, rather than the other way around. Software makers excel at just this kind of thing, frequently imposing machine logic where the user could reasonably have made a more sensible decision. The user is frequently constructed as a source of errors; a problem that needs to be overcome, rather than as a powerful component of a processing triad made up of hardware, software and wetware.

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I recently read an article that questioned whether Web 2.0 was shaping up to be the next dot com crash. It’s an interesting question, not because it might be, but because a pattern is being repeated. The pattern I’m thinking about is not the familiar boom-bust cycle caused by over-hyping a market. I’m thinking about the way that Wall Street and the commercial media pick up on Internet ideas sometime after they’ve been widely accepted by most people, and then proceed to bend and twist the idea until it is a meaningless lump over over-valued stock market fodder.

This colonisation of a popular idea is an interesting phenomenon that exists outside of the Internet, but for me is most visible on the Internet, because that’s my main area of focus. Indeed, the Internet itself has been subject to the phenomenon. It works something like this: some idea or social même develops seemingly spontaneously (but beware – everything develops within a context!). This idea goes through a process of adoption and diffusion, and reaches a critical mass of popularity. At this point the mainstream commercial forces become involved. The phenomenon is popularised through the mainstream media, and is bought into by mainstream commercial interests (read: big companies). By the time this happens, the early adopters have generally moved on because the thing they were using and found value in has now changed.

Social networking, or Web 2.0 (although technically social networking is a subset of Web 2.0), is currently the darling of the mainstream media. Ever since Newscorp bought into mySpace, we’ve seen all kinds of more mainstream discussions of social networking and prognostications and commentary from the business elite. Web 2.0 has become a Wall Street fad. When the enthusiasm for the fad diminishes (and no doubt we’ll see this when the bottom falls out of the market, or when the next fad comes along), web 2.0 will be dropped – pilloried by many of those who are currently singing its praises.

Sadly, all this serves to weaken – or at least, to subvert – the core ideas of Web 2.0, which itself is a buzz-term for a more fundamental general set of principles that have evolved within Internet communities for over 20 years. In a short time, Web 2.0, which until now has served as a useful entry point to educating people about the value of networks in online social activity, will be dismissed by readers and students as last year’s fad. That’s fine, but it would be a shame to toss out the baby with the bathwater

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