OPEN

I really like Euan Semple’s post:

The biggest risk of Web 2.0 …

… is that giving it a name affords people the excuse of seeing it as a fad, dismissing it, and missing the longer term shifts in society that were probably happening anyway but that the web is almost certainly speeding up.

Instinctively I’m wary of new words of jargon, when I’m talking to a general audience. I even think carefully about how I use the – highly useful – phrase “social media”, in case it turns out to be a faddish concept.

It pays to think of words as useful tools, ways of framing and bringing ideas to life. There’s a lot of energy wasted arguing semantics sometimes, when it’s the fundamentals, the truth of what is happening that is the important thing.

The way I think of “Web 2.0” and even “social media” is of them being useful to conversation and thinking right here and now. When they cease to be we’ll pick up some new words – or just revert to old ones (like “the web” and “media”) which have absorbed their meaning.

Think like a future historian, is my motto. Give yourself some distance on now and keep trying to place things that are happening right now in context. 

Web 2.0 will one day seem as dated as a micro-scooter and Foosball in reception before long. But the fundamentals of the revolution we are living through, the democratisation of knowledge, the ubiquity of the ability to create and distribute content, the age of open networks replacing industrial media, will abide. Whatever we call it.