December 18, 2006: Another Triumph for Virtuality

It would appear that Time has now lined up behind all of the other lemmings trying to escape reality. They have drunk the Kool-Aid of Web 2.0 propaganda and named as Person of the Year the new Digital Everyman who locks out reality with his iPod earbuds, neverending cellphone activity, and a desperate search for companionship on Second Life. To reflect on a much older cover of this magazine, the question is not whether God is dead but whether, at least in the Time view of the world, reality is dead!

August 29, 2006 (2): Back in the Box?

Taking a whack at Web 2.0 has led me to wonder whether there is still any buzz over Web Services. When the book Out of the Box was published, I was working for a boss who wanted to see our laboratory go after the brass ring of Web Services in a big way; and I ended up being the annoying voice that kept saying, "Yes, but ... ." I just went to the Amazon site for this book and found that the last review was written in September of 2003. For me the operative sentence from that review was:

A highly readable work, just about the book's only weakness is that it is indeed based largely on conjecture, and the premise that today's web service protocols will form the foundation of long-term IT development.

I found myself thinking about this book last week when I was reading a 1983 paper from the American Sociological Review by Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, entitled "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields." What fascinated me about this paper is the argument it provided that, in any given field, such as health care, education, or even politics, the organizations that populate the field tends towards resembling each other rather than towards diversity. Thus, they manifest the phenomenon of the replication of social systems that lies at the heart of Anthony Giddens' structuration theory.

The more I read, the more I realized that, while Hagel had envisioned a world that could thrive on the diversity of software services that could be installed on the Web, the necessary infrastructure required just that kind of homogeneity that DiMaggio and Powell had studied. It is all very well and good to have representation for a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) or a mechanism for Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI), but these representations can only link together different users of those users share some conventions on how those representations are structured. In other words the kinds of connection scenarios that Hagel presented can only work in a context of homogeneity among the beneficiaries in those scenarios. This then led me to ask whether or not, viewed as a population, Web sites are becoming more homogeneous or more diverse? I think we are still in a period of great diversity (which would not be good for Web Services); but it is not out of the question that the processes DiMaggio and Powell claim lead to homogenization, coercive, mimetic, and normative, will not eventually kick into action on the Web. Watch this space for further developments!

August 29, 2006 (1): The Next Economic Bubble?

Rafe Needleman came up with a great title for his Web 2.0 blog yesterday: "Are there any Web 2.0 businesses in the real world?" After reading his argument, which involved a critical reading of the values of the Cluetrain Manifesto, I decided to follow up with my own TalkBack entry. I called it "Bubble 2.0," because I am always on the lookout for the inflation of the next economic bubble. As I put it, I wanted to argue that "the primary source of gas" for the current inflation is Web 2.0. Here is an edited version of my reasoning:

We should have learned from the last bubble that sobering concepts such as "the real world" just do not signify during bubble inflation, probably because the very act of inflation in grounded in an arrogant utopianism. ("Don't worry about the real world--or the 'old economy' or whatever--because after the changes you won't recognize it any more!") Consider Needleman's account of the Cluetrain Manifesto and its "shiny new values competing with reasonable but conservative older values:"

• Simplicity over Completeness
• Long tail over Mass Audience
• Share over Protect
• Advertise over Subscribe
• Syndication over Stickiness
• Early Availability over Correctness
• Select by Crowd over Editor
• Honest voice over Corporate Speak
• Participation over Publishing
• Community over Product

There is (at least) one entry missing from this list. It's absence discloses the dirty secret of the whole story. The entry I have in mind is:

• Confidence over credibility

Bubbles are inflated by claims that, when viewed in retrospect have little, if any, credibility; but enthusiasm over the inflation dismisses any reasoned attempts to warrant those claims. Rather than reading The Cluetrain Manifesto, folks should be reading Mark Taylor's Confidence Games and its attempt to argue that our daily life, particularly as shaped by advanced technology, now plays out as one confidence game after another.

This not to say that we should hurl our wooden shoes into the works of the new engines of these confidence games. However, the Internet can help us to be more critical readers, rather than just more "clued-in" ones. If we read those ten enumerated value shifts more critically, we shall probably be less enthusiastic about embracing them. Some of us might even think our way through to dialectical syntheses that might play out in the real world!