The Internet, Web 2.0, and Beyond
33 The Internet, Web 2.0, and Beyond Nathan Jurgenson and George Ritzer Technology changes rapidly, often transforming the social world in the process. The internet, Web 2.0 in particular, is a perfect, even an extreme, example of this fact. This chapter focuses on the changes in the last half-decade that have radically transformed the web, creating what many now describe as Web 2.0 (succeeding the largely earlier Web 1.0). This new version of the internet is defined by the explosion in user-generated content. Because so many people are actively involved in this, as well as in the internet in general, their social lives have changed, sometimes dra- matically. Furthermore, new, very active, social worlds have been, and are being, created on the internet; users are actively creating a more richly social internet. Because of its impact on the larger social world, and because of the social worlds that it is creating, Web 2.0, as well as whatever form the web takes in the future (Web 3.0), should (must) be of increasing concern to sociologists. Technology is social: an inTroducTion To social Technologies online Barry Wellman (Wellman, Salaff, Dimitrova, Garton, Gulia & Haythornthwaite 1996; Wellman & Gulia 1999a, 1999b; Wellman, Haase, Witte & Hampton 2001; Wellman & Haythornthwaite 2002) has argued that computer networks can be social (see especially Wellman et al.’s [1996] article, “Computer Networks as Social Networks: Collaborative Work, Telework, and Virtual Community”). One of his early insights is that virtual communities are based more on shared interests The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Sociology, First Edition.
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