Humanizing the Web

Change and Social Innovation

H. Oinas-Kukkonen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137305701
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios internacionales

Offers a vivid description of the ongoing transformation of the web into something that is widely recognized and that will have an enormous impact on how people work and live their lives in the future. Presents concepts that will help readers understand why the web evolved as it did, what is going on right now, and what will happen next.

Part I

Introduction and History

1

A Shift in Thinking about the Web

The web has become an integral part of business, work and general culture. With an amazing pace, it has transformed from being an esoteric computer application used by academics and tech-savvy youth into being an ordinary household tool and important communication vehicle for people of all ages and professions, and its role in modern society only seems to keep growing. Most importantly, the web has shown the capability to change people’s lives.

Just as contemporary cars are different from their ancestors in the late nineteenth century, the web is different from what it used to be in its early days. When the web was introduced in the early 1990s, it was a collection of text, pictures and hyperlinks in relatively simple form, but the web has become a vehicle for media consumption, rapid communication and social engagement. Much of this was envisioned a long time ago by hypertext and multimedia researchers, but some of the things that we find on the web today nobody was able to forecast. Moreover, the web has been and still is a changing object. In order for companies and even individuals to be able to cope with and compete in this setting, it is important to understand the change that has already taken place in the web arena, to identify its mechanisms and to recognize the direction and pace for its next steps. Our claim is that the change of the web is resulting in the humanizing of the web and thus, in a matter of fact, fulfilling the web’s original promise.

There is a term which came about to denote a second generation of Internet-based services – web 2.0. The first known use of the term dates back to a magazine article in 1999 targeted at web designers primarily in relation to design and aesthetics.¹ Later, Vice President Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly Media used the term in 2003 for characterizing the survival of the web industry after the dotcom burst.² In the following year, Tim O’Reilly used it as the theme of the first Web 2.0 Conference, referring to it as the second generation of web-based services that feature openness for collaboration and interactivity.³ After that the term became widely attributed to him.⁴

Mark Granovetter, Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, explains that people who are using the term web 2.0 rarely have a clear view about what it means. In typical Silicon Valley style, the term has a loose definition. It is first and foremost a catchphrase which catches people’s imagination and makes more venture capital flow. Yet, sometimes giving an entity a label may also accelerate the process of actually making it happen.⁵ According to Paul Saffo, technology forecaster and futurist in Silicon Valley, generally innovations are named first and invented later. Therefore it is not surprising that the term web 2.0 is overused in many ways. Everyone also wants to be part of the future and the change rather than being part of the past. The implication is that whereas there is “web 1.0” which is old and not as interesting, there is the “web 2.0” which is the new exciting version. Of course, people have already iterated on this and there has been discussion on “web 3.0” developing even now. However, this discussion has been premature and the second generation of the web is still happening.

Still, web 2.0 is not only a catchphrase or a flagship leading in a maritime fleet. It is also a bandwagon onto which people jump at their own time. Indeed, the term is a way of creating awareness that we are moving in a certain direction. The slogan as such came out at a time when people were looking at the shift from primarily a broadcast version of the web with major providers, big networks and big players such as universities, schools and companies to a more distributed web made up of people who put material on the web for everybody else to see. Terry Winograd, a computer science professor at Stanford University and one of the originators of Google’s success, explains: “If you think back to the early web, the model that people had of the web user was a sort of serious scientist, so comments would be like you wrote a paper and I want to add some footnotes to your paper. It wasn’t a kid who wanted to say that his dog was running around. That just wasn’t who they were thinking of. The mechanisms in those early days were not tuned to the audience that became the web 2.0.”

Not being able to tell exactly which things belong to the second generation of the web and which do not may be frustrating for those who are longing for exact and uncluttered definitions. But this is not a unique situation. For instance, one would need to think about the labeling of the cultural movement called Renaissance. It began in Florence, Italy in the Late Middle Ages and then spread across the rest of Europe. Its varied versions were not uniform but rather they took slightly different forms in different parts of the continent, and yet there is a general use of the term which refers to it as a historic era. In an ever-changing business environment, it is even more important to allow a little bit of uncertainty. It does not make sense to nail down every definition to the finest detail to keep one’s senses open for rapid changes. Yet, the relatively big changes in the web’s makeup and façade also require some more terminological and conceptual clarity, and there is an explanation as to how the second generation of the web is different than the original web.

The social web

A widespread adoption of networked information technologies⁶ has made the second generation of the web possible, but the most essential change that has taken place is not about particular technology but it is rather a shift in thinking about how the web may be and is being used. This dramatic change is very meaningful irrespective of what label is given to it.

In technology transfer expert Tim O’Reilly’s vision, the essence of the second generation of the web is really about the Internet starting to become a platform for applications rather than an application itself. In a way, this enables a new kind of an operating system for applications to be created. This implies that rather than developing a multitude of new stand-alone applications and technologies, what we are starting to observe more and more is the coordination of the existing information systems. A simple example of this is provided by devices with geographical positioning linked with a location database. So when you say “pizza,” you don’t get the Wikipedia entry for pizza, but you get the three local pizza places with exact locations. This is the equivalent of hand-eye coordination between information systems.

The web as a platform also means that data rather than applications become the key driver for competitive advantage – and not just any data but specifically data that are generated by users and user activity. Thus, the web as a platform gives user-generated content much greater prominence than ever before. In addition to treating the web as a platform and encouraging users to participate, a key concept is providing a rich user experience. This has multiple meanings.⁷ The basic meaning of rich user experience refers to the web-based applications’ capability to offer graphical user interfaces familiar from desktop computers; a deeper sense refers to the provision of positive user experience on a more profound psychological level.

Yet, it is not only user-generated content and activity or rich user experience, but the social activity around content generation that epitomizes the current era. The term social web refers to a pattern of thinking in which the end-users jointly create or generate much or perhaps even most of the content for the web, whereas companies try to harness the end-users with tools with which they can participate and engage themselves in content production and sharing. For this reason, the term social web describes the phenomenon in a more detailed manner than the term web 2.0.

The term social web was used already in the 1950s in the context of historical research even if this was not in relation to information technology. In 1955, historian August C. Krey published a book History and the Social Web: A Collection of Essays.⁸ In Krey’s vision, the social web or social network that people form with each other, was to be elevated as one of the central elements in explaining a historical phenomenon. He considered the Renaissance as a prime example for understanding the need for this kind of approach to understanding history.

As described above, the early web was essentially the delivery of services from a centralized source to an individual customer. Even with the state-of-art technologies, it was principally that the user had to enter into a special electronic place and interact there. Of course, it was not that there wasn’t any social interaction. There were chat rooms and message boards, for instance, but the degree to which social constructs were supported by technology was much lower. All of this changed with the appearance of the social web. An essential feature of the social web phenomenon is that social web is not only a virtual world; what is remarkable about it is its interconnection with one’s own life. It is not just that one is connected to people on the web, but one is actually closely connected to people in one’s real-world life be it professional or personal connections. Indeed, the web affects the user’s life rather than their virtual life only.

The social web is a reconstruction in the World Wide Web of people’s lives, and yet this reconstruction by no means is the whole matter. The social web comes down all the way to who you talk to and who within your family or friends you are in touch with. Even if pseudonyms are still common, for the most part, the social web encourages people to use their real identities rather than to act through pseudonyms only. Millions of people establishing identities and connections online are actually changing how we think about the web. What makes this even more interesting, challenging, and even threatening is that when there are hundreds of millions of people establishing a presence through profiles and other kinds of mechanisms and interacting with people, new kinds of applications that can transform people’s lives may be, are being and will be developed. Some effects may be for better and some for worse.

Co-creation of value by social web users

People in general tend to think of the social web as literally the platforms and applications that connect them with other people no matter what they happen to be at a given point of time. Well-known examples of services in the social web are, for instance, Wikipedia, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, FourSquare and Groupon. Wikipedia is a major encyclopedia in which almost all of its content is created by end-users. The rockstar company of the era, Facebook, provides opportunities to keep in touch with one’s friends via the platform it provides; LinkedIn is an application to establish and manage professional connections; and Twitter enables tagging and sending short text messages to one’s network both via mobile devices and on the web. Flickr provides social photo sharing, and YouTube enables the same with video clips. More recently, many other social web services have gained popularity, too. Yet, the social web is not only about these applications; it is first and foremost about a broader phenomenon that is going on: connectedness. We are highly – often overwhelmingly – connected with other people when our devices are connected, our applications are connected, but also the data that we generate is connected with lots of other data. In addition to this, there are many kinds of applications that take advantage of such relationships, which form the broader social portrait.

Understanding this tight coupling is an essential part of understanding not only the contemporary web but also the future web. The change that has taken place in the web as an information and communication environment is similar to the shift that previously took place from old-style character-based software applications to graphical user interfaces. Everybody was able to see it, but the changes were more profound and radical than they appeared at first sight. Many new features were developed after users got the computer mouse and multi-window displays. A similar change happened when we moved into the social web – a data-driven platform in which people are finally considered as more important than technology.

Hundreds of millions of people today not only recognize social networking sites but also actually use them on a regular basis. The social web, including blogging, tagging, wikis and many other facets of communication, has enabled web users not only to use these services but also to start to contribute to the services and interact with each other through them. The content which they may generate can be text, such as in Wikipedia; photos, such as in Flickr; videos, such as in YouTube; location data, such as in FourSquare, or something else. But the format of the media is not the important characteristic; more important is that users can link these pieces of information together and share them with their friends, acquaintances, business contacts, and others. Many new kinds of tools for knowledge sharing and online collaboration have been developed, which in a true sense take advantage of high-speed Internet technology and its global scope and enable users to contribute to collective intelligence. This denotes a big change from the situation in which content providers, such as news corporations or educational institutions, formerly put material on the web, which in practice was one-way communication only. Although interaction between the users and the producers of information and even among the users was possible in this older model, it was still very limited.

Even if many of the technologies in wide use today were invented decades ago, for the first time in history they are available not only for teams or a limited number of colleagues but to a multitude of users. Many of the social web services have been able to arouse interest in millions of users and in social web applications the number of users really accounts. A mere dozen videos provided by a dozen enthusiasts on most hobbies may not be much, but 10,000 or perhaps a million is a whole different story. This is also why the number of users creates value for web companies in the current era. At the launch of a new service a young company does not probably have very many users and the amount of content available for its users may be small. However, by producing content and via this creating value, users are able to play a key role in the development, and even success, of these companies from their early stages on.

Not all content is good content, of course; sometimes users are just spouting random opinions. But rather than from one single opinion the social web’s power comes from understanding the opinions as a whole, realizing what the masses of people think.⁹ Nevertheless, because of this inherent idea that users co-create value¹⁰ through active generation of the content, the social web applications have the capability of improving along the way as they are able to attract more users. This incremental view towards web applications is natural and similar to human growth in which one doesn’t wake up as a baby simply thinking, “Ok, there seems to be this big sign that says mama and the big sign that says dada.” Rather we start making associations over time.

Social web innovation

It is important to understand that the web has different meanings to different people. A technologist may think of the web as a system of protocols; someone else might think of it as the worl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  Introduction and History
• Part II  Social Web as a Transformer
• Part III  Social Web as an Innovation Accelerator
• Part IV  Social Web as a Humanizer
• Part V  Final Remarks
• Notes
• Primary sources
• References
• Index