Web 2.0: An Argument Against Convergence

Abstract

This chapter, first published in First Monday in 2008 and presented here with a new introduction, argues that Web 2.0 can be best understood as a key intervention, from within the dot.com/new-media business sector, recovering from the crash, that reasserts the equal legitimacy of the use of networked computing, over high-speed lines, for computing-oriented activities, and not just video on demand and voice over IP. Web 2.0 provides evidence that, while there is a convergence of all forms of media and communications towards similar data traffic over the internet, there remain diverging views over the nature, control and use of the internet, views that express the degree to which corporate players imagine themselves to be “media”, “telephony” or “computing” in primary orientation.