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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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It’s not a new idea, but it’s one that I think has more legs than I’m seeing evidence of in the academic press. Cultural studies developed the idea of a text in the 1980s to include all kinds of things — from photos, soap opera and film, to consumer objects like cars and the Sony Walkman.

A text is something that is imbued with meaning through a process of production and consumption. So, a classical text (a poem, say) is produced by a writer, who intends the poem to have some meaning. For cultural studies, the reader then is free to interpret the text in a way that might be different to the author’s original intent.

So, what does all this have to do with software? Software can be treated as a text, too. It’s written by people who have a clear idea of its use. In many cases, software will be used as expected, but sometimes people use software for unexpected things. Software also has meaning – meaning that is written into it by the software’s makers, and meaning that is ‘read’ from it by software users.

It’s an interesting concept that provides one way of looking at software as a politically-bounded cultural object, rather than as a technological object that is somehow curiously neutral.

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