While a lot of different people have attempted to deploy the term Web 3.0 to mean pretty much anything they like, I’ve read more and more reports in the last couple of weeks that seem to be positioning Web 3.0 as the locking down of all of the socially shared information that has been the core of Web 2.0. Here’s an example from Australia’s The Age:
WEB 2.0 is well established, and sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Digg have turned the internet from a static source of information into a huge, interactive digital playground. But where to next? What will the next stage of web culture – which some people call Web 3.0 – be like? The expectation seems to be that profound changes are on the way. If Web 2.0 is about generating and sharing your own content, Web 3.0 will make information less free.Privacy fears, new forms of advertising, and restrictions imposed by media companies will mean more digital walls, leading to a web that’s safer but without its freewheeling edge. […]This openness is one of the defining features of Web 2.0. But software specialist Nat Torkington, of high-tech publishing house O’Reilly Media, predicts a backlash. He argues that one serious leak or theft of private data could change opinions overnight.”It could be a Three Mile Island of the net,” he says, referring to the 1979 accident that turned the US public against nuclear power.
While this story is more about a more locked-down web being forthcoming rather than present, it’s been noteworthy that the same paper has since run stories about the ease of hacking computers via browsers thanks to Web 2.0 technologies, the fact that stolen identities are being sold cheap by criminals since they’re so easy to obtain thanks to poor web security, and one more nasty tale about 6 teenage girls who lured another girl to one of their homes and then beat her viciously before posting a video of the beating online (or, as The Age called it “an ‘animalistic’ YouTube attack”).
So, the two broad possibilities you’d garner from reading The Age this week are either that Web 2.0 is the root of great evil and needs to be secured immediately, or that someone editing the technology sections of The Age is trying to push for a dramatic change in online culture. (Or, possibly, some middle ground between the two.) What do you think: are the freedoms of Web 2.0 going to be curtailed due to rampant misuse?
Photo by Darwin Bell (CC BY NC)
New Blog Post … Web 3.0: A Locked Down, “Secured” Web 2.0? http://tinyurl.com/6fgo5u
Hi Tama, I enjoy reading your blog. My research looks at young people’s uses of online networks in Australia. In response to your question I would have to say that Web 2.0 platforms are already locked down to many young people in Australia. I think you may be in Perth but in Queensland the Education Dept have long blocked students use of all web-based email, chat, popular social networking sites including MySpace, Bebo, Tagged and Facebook, content sharing networking sites like Flickr and YouTube and popular blogging sites such as LiveJournal and Blogger. Have you looked at the free software offered by the past Howard government as part of their NetAlert initiative? I don’t know how many households and libraries took up the free offer but the software has amazing capabilities. Like the ability to have all logged chat conversations posted to the administrator without the knowledge of the person chatting, key word blocks, category search blocks, all online networks and games blocked…I think articles like the Age one you have mentioned above don’t help. Almost all of the online “horror stories” involving young people that are in the Australian media are from the US. Also I don’t think the Age called it an “animalistic” attack -they were citing the US County Sherriff? But those words make good headlines.
Hi Tanya! You’re quite right about the K-12 education environment in Australia being largely locked down and filtered already. I was at a briefing session by ACMA and NetAlert about a year ago and I was staggered at the energy that was being put in to blocking access to large chunks of the web (and how paranoid people were that kids would ‘hack’ their way to the full web in schools even though they often didn’t face any such restrictions at home). I’m sure that the same minds are behind the idea of filtering and logging all communication by Australian kids!
It would even more of a shame, though, if the same sort of security and filtration mentality ended up being applied to the wider web as well (then, I guess, the state education departments would have less to block!),
Oh, and I realise that ‘animalistic’ is a quote in The Age, but as you say, choosing that expression for a headline certainly situates the tone of the piece pretty concretely as a negative portrayal of YouTube and online culture (even if, really, it’s an indictment of six misguided teenagers).