Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2007) 27, 1–23. Printed in the USA.
Copyright ? 2008 Cambridge University Press 0267-1905/08 $12.00
doi: 10.1017/S0267190508070013
1. AUDIENCE, AUTHORSHIP, AND ARTIFACT: THE EMERGENT
SEMIOTICS OF WEB 2.0
Mark Warschauer and Douglas Grimes
The second-generation Web has amplified and extended new ways of online
communication. Millions of people now interact through blogs, collaborate through
wikis, play multiplayer games, publish podcasts and video, build relationships
through social network sites, and evaluate all the above forms of communication
through feedback and ranking mechanisms. This article analyzes the emergent
semiotics of what has been called Web 2 .0 by focusing on three critical elements of
language use and communication: audience, authorship, and artifact. Drawing on
recent theoretical and empirical work, this article considers the significance of
transformations in these three areas for both research and teaching.
In the 1980s and 1990s, many scholars were noting the revolutionary
potential of new information and communication technologies for transforming
human communication and production of knowledge (see, e.g., Harnad, 1991).
However, even by the late 1990s, the Internet was not yet accessed by the majority of
the population in any country (National Telecommunications and Information
Administration, 1999; United Nations Development Programme, 1999). Fewer people
still were able to publish online, as that required specialized software and/or skills
that were not widespread at that time (see discussion in Warschauer, 2003). The Web
was thus developing more as a tool for accessing information created by small
numbers of people, rather than for creativity and collaboration on content contributed
by the broad public (e.g., see the critique by Berners-Lee, 1999, who is widely
credited with having invented the Web.)
Less than a decade later, the situation has changed dramatically. Today, 50%
or more of the population has access to the Internet in 35 countries (Miniwatts
Marketing Group, 2007). Equally important, barriers to online publishing,
collaboration, and creative production have fallen dramatically. Widely available
software and sites allow computer users of all types to interact through blogs,
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2 WARSCHAUER AND GRIMES
Table 1. Web 1.0 Versus Web 2.0
Web 1.0 Web 2.0
Ofoto –> Flickr
mp3.com –> Napster
Britannica Online –> Wikipedia
personal Web sites –> blogging
publishing –> participation
content management systems –> wikis
directories (taxonomy) –> tagging (“folksonomy”)
Excerpted from O’Reilly (2007)
collaborate through wikis, play multiplayer games, publish podcasts and video, build
relationships through social network sites, and otherwise shape the content of the Web
through feedback and evaluation mechanisms (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu,
2007).
The constellation of features that allow these new types of online
communication is often referred to as Web 2 .0 , meaning the second generation of the
World Wide Web (see O’Reilly, 2007). There is some debate as to the accuracy of the
term, since many of the technical capacities of Web 2.0 have been present in the Web
all along, even if they were previously more difficult to access (Wikipedia, 2007a).
However, when approaching the question from a social rather than technical
perspective, there is little doubt that the ways people make use of the Web have
qualitatively changed in the last few years.
What Is Web 2.0?
Though the term suggests a new version of Web technology, it refers instead
to changes in the communicative uses of the underlying Web platform. O’Reilly, who
popularized the term in 2003, used a series of examples to characterize what he saw
as the differences between the first- and second-generation Web (O’Reilly, 2007; see
Table 1 here). Probably the key distinction among these is that between publication
and participation. The earlier Web allowed people to publish content, but much of
that online material ended up in isolated information silos. The new Web’s
architecture allows more interactive forms of publishing (of textual and multimedia
content), participation, and networking through blogs, wikis, and social network sites.
These participatory sites enable and rely on user-generated tagging of content, which
itself can be aggregated into a user-generated taxonomy known as a folksonomy. Sites
such as Flickr, Napster, and Wikipedia thus allow users to generate, link, evaluate,
and share a wide variety of online content.
These differences between Web 1.0 and 2.0 were summarized by Wesch
(2007) as an evolution from the linking of information to the linking of people. The
way that both information and people are linked on Web 2.0 has deep significance for