I am 2.0 aern't I? I mean.. Yes I am 2.0, of course!

Watching the kind of thrashing I have seen with Web2.0 and Gov2.0 and everything 2.0 has made me a bit uneasy. This uneasiness, and they way I have expressed it, I have been told (fairly) is a bit vague, so I thought I would try and express some of the things that have been bothering me, as an attempt to clarify some concerns about the social processes I have seen unfold in the evolution of the diffusion of the “2.0” across networks of people and their cultures.

One of the trends I have found bothersome in my participation in has been the transition  in the framing of the discourse from the inventors and innovators to the pundits.  In the earlier days of the O'reilly brand (and I am only referencing this brand because it is the touchstone for this conversation), which were from the beginning the most commercially focused of open source, served as a meeting place and a place of discovery by those who could package and brand, the frontline iconoclasts that they helped connect and discover each other. These geeks would create things because they had personal desires and points of view about what they wanted to reinvent or create.  These were places of imagination, of reinvention, of a strange and wonderful collaboration that underlies the Internet. O'reilly and events like it served as a kind of commune for a generative effort, filled with the right kind of discord, discourse and creative tension.

But somewhere this conversation changed.  It became about a brand detached form a point of view about how you would reinvent, extend and evolve the Internet and the Web (the great artifacts of our time in my opinion).  Instead they became about teaching to the uninitiated, convincing them that they ought adopt a new model that was different, as opposed to figuring out how to make the models inclusive to their concerns and reflective of who they were.  This is a kind of bifurcation, an unnecessary polarizing dialogue between the “cognoscenti” and the uniformed masses.

More and more the self appointed experts (experts which before were defined by their creative endeavors) would show up at events that brought in “outsiders” and “non-natives” and tell them that their models about the world were wrong, and that they didn’t really understand the world.  Instead of relating to how the new inventions and innovations had this inclusive capacity to reframe shared traits, it became about how these new efforts were ones that required them to transform.  The conversation became about exclusivity, hipness between those that “got it” and those that didn’t.

The irony that an increasing number of these so called “experts” are less a part of the organic nature of the innovations that shaped the current landscape, only adds to a type of malaise that to many creators feels like an usurpation of outputs without the rewarding generative social process and commitment to creation.

This transition is one the has “popified”  the development of new technologies, treated them as simplistic formulas and dismissed the artistic innovations of the “pure thought stuff”.  They have also lead to a strange kind of self affirming unreality.  Companies and products that have yet to justify their value propositions (and I mean this in the expansive sense)  somehow became valuable by anointment of preference, by buzz. They seem, to me, to be increasingly simulacra.

It is little wonder that they get consumed like bubble gum, masticated and spit out, trends without cores, like social-technological equivalents of jingles and pop tunes - the crowd leaping from one to the other. As well, the transition in the discussion about them has increasingly detached the creative act, and is defined instead by the perceived popularity and social capital of participants that fall into this nebulous term. This is a classic inversion, whereby now the correctness of your opinions about 2.0 seem to be more about your “power” or popularity (after all your only as important as the number of twitter followers you have) than about the value of what you have created in a critical context.  2.0 means anything to anybody and therefore means nothing to anyone. Time has brought less clarity and less context, not more.

Perhaps this ought be expected, as it is so with most any trend in technology development (that process that sits between science and art and relies on metaphor and the understanding of the similar and dissimilar) and the transition of innovations and inventions to market phenomena. 

The 2.0 meme is now 5 years old since it was officially named.  I believe its time for a  re-grounding and a new type of criticism.  That process ought begin in going back to the sources of innovation and invention, to focusing on the generative capacity that underpins the greatest acts of creation of this era, and rely less on the increasingly meaningless attempt at self descriptions motivated by a desire to conform to an idealized concept, whereby any action is 2.0 because we describe it as a 2.0 action, any event is 2.0 because we say its a 2.0 event and any institution and culture is 2.0 because, well, we say it has to be so to be in the now, to be one of the hip kids with the right pop song on our ipod, chewing our bubblegum, waiting to like a new band or song when everyone tells us its good.