"A micro-heroic, Nietzschean act of the pyjama people"

No matter how much talk there is of "community" and "mobs", the fact remains that blogs are primarily used as a tool to manage the self. Lovink 2007 

My first jolt of different thinking about Web 2.0, social networking, wikis and blogging came from a fascinating essay in Eurozine called Blogging, the nihilist impulse by Geert Lovink. I  talked about it with Adelaide blogger Bill Kerr earlier this year.

Another jolt came when I read Sherry Turkle's recent Forbes magazine article Can You Hear Me Now?  on how “Thanks to technology, people have never been more connected--or more alienated”

Geert Lovink has the more challenging text – some paragraph’s deserve to be framed

As a micro-heroic, Nietzschean act of the pyjama people, blogging grows out of a nihilism of strength, not out of the weakness of pessimism. Instead of time and again presenting blog entries as self-promotion, we should interpret them as decadent artifacts that remotely dismantle the mighty and seductive power of the broadcast media.Lovink 2007

But both have been helpful when tracking differing viewpoints from what "the group" is claiming about Web 2.0 – something I have been doing ever since cj suggested it was worthy of a closer focus a while back. 

An analysis of Web 2.0 claims from the New Zealand educators mimics overseas suggestions that the internet and stuff like blogs, wikis, and social networking sites are creating a paradigm shift towards a new participatory culture, - a change in the shape of education that the 21st Century learner is already immersed in.   

The popular intel is claiming that:
•    the internet and stuff like blogs, wikis, and social networking sites have changed the way people behave –and is leading to a participatory culture. 
•    these changes are being driven by the digital native rather than the digital immigrant.

For example check out the pre conference blurb for Core Education’s No Time for Online Conference How Web 2.0 Technologies are Shaping Education

In the past, the Internet was used to gain and access information, but with the introduction of new technologies, these have changed the way people behave on the Internet. Web 1.0 was the internet as a library where you went to look up information. Web 2.0 is about collaboration, connecting and learning from each other. Information as conversation. Social interaction and participation is a feature of many new technologies. Young people all around the world are using new technologies to link and connect with each other.

When you are enveloped in group think, and everyone is repeating the same stuff it is easy to be caught up in a Charles Mackay like “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” moment

In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.  Mackay 1852

But exposure to other web hype moments like Clay Shirky’s Second Life statistics thinking mean I require much more proof before I am prepared to play.

Second Life, the much-hyped virtual world backed by Benchmark Capital, is heading towards two million users. Except it isn't, really. We all know how this game works, and has since the earliest days of the web:

There's nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived.

Mackay’s thinking about delusion and Shirky’s analysis of over hyped data means that I am no longer prepared to take claims of an imminent Web 2.0 precipitated “paradigm shift” to a participatory culture on board without looking for supporting evidence.

Which is why Bill Tancer’s article on Who's Really Participating in Web 2.0 in Time Business captured my attention.

According to Hitwise, only 0.2% of visits to YouTube are users uploading a video, 0.05% visits to Google Video include uploaded videos and 0.16% of Flickr visits are people posting photos. Only the social encyclopedia Wikipedia shows a significant amount of participation, with 4.56% of visits to the site resulting in content editing.

The digital native  digital immigrant participation thing might also be a out of wack, for Hitwise data reveals that

Not only is the percentage of participation very small online, there are some very strong skews as to who is participating. Visitors to Wikipedia are almost equally split 50/50 men and women, yet edits to Wikipedia entries are 60% male. The gender gap is even greater for YouTube, a site whose visitors are equally male and female, but whose uploaders are over 76% male.
With age comes experience, as well as the desire to disseminate knowledge. There is a clear age difference between visitors to Wikipedia and editors of its content. Over 45% of visitors to the site are under the age of 35, while 82% of those making edits to the site are 35 years old or older.
Web 2.0 has been successful in significantly broadening the amount material available to us, but reviewing the latest data reveals that we're still in the very early stages.

Perhaps we will all have to join Bebo like Ailsa  to find these paradigm shifts to socially networked participatory cultures that everyone is talking about.

All of the above explains why I am hanging out for the upcoming MediaBerkman talk  by Corinna di Gennaro on Digital Natives: Participatory Culture or Self-Representation?