The open-access online journal First Monday has just published a special issue devoted to critiques of Web 2.0. There have been few such attempts heretofore, the most well-known being fellow Colbert Report guest Andrew Keen’s naive and poorly-argued book The Cult of the Amateur.

Thankfully, the articles in First Monday’s special issue are top-notch, and everyone should go read them, now. Here’s the contents to whet your appetite:

Preface: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0

Michael Zimmer

Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0

Trebor Scholz

Web 2.0: An argument against convergence

Matthew Allen

Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0

Kylie Jarrett

Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation

Søren Mørk Petersen

The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0

Michael Zimmer

Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance

Anders Albrechtslund

History, Hype, and Hope: An Afterward

David Silver

published March 5, 2008

Comments

  1. Mark Nelson

    These are actually much better than expected; thanks for the link! It’s difficult to navigate a middle ground between, on the one hand, what you point out is naive and poor argument, and on the other hand, what would turn out to be interesting to theorists but a bit ivory-tower and inaccessible—but these do a decent job.

    There are a few slip-ups, though. The only essay I was particularly disappointed in was “Loser Generated Content”, which has a potential to make a decent argument, but instead slips into what seems like an unnecessary Marxist critique of capitalism. That in itself would be okay except for the fact that it really does feel unnecessary and a bit forced—many of the same points could be made in a more general and accessible way that doesn’t rely on using “capitalism” as a generic pejorative, since many people who find capitalism a reasonable mode of economic relations in general could still be convinced by very similar arguments that the “do stuff for large corporations for free” model of Web 2.0 crowdsourcing isn’t really in their interests.

    In any case, still worth the read.