the geeky and the good
OK, this might be the story I’d give a media studies person if they asked about this whole Web 2.0 nonsense. Tim O’Reilly’s canonical piece is great, but it’s a little too utopian and a little too geeky for the folks in my department. This piece is good at de-mystifying the buzzword, neatly summarizing the concept by saying “the open standards of the web are being repackaged as Web 2.0 for a Wall Street audience.” It’s great that the article points out that Web 2.0 is seen primarily from a business perspective, but I do think that “the read-write Web” has a lot of potential for producing participatory media.
I suppose Indymedia was an effort to bring this concept to activists, but it seems to be a bit of a failure. It’s non-activist audience seems to consist of right-wingers interested in taking quotes out of context to make disingenuous generalizations about liberals and leftists - six years later, Indymedia no longer seems to have the potential to reach new audiences. It’s become more of an Internet version of Deep Dish TV, a distribution system for documentaries for sympathetic audiences. I wonder what an Indymedia 2.0 would look like.
