Profile: Roughtype.com

Looking for precedents for my own blog, I stumbled across Nicholas Carr’s blog roughtype.com, a blog which provides insightful commentary on contemporary technology and its social, economic, and cultural implications. While there are many blogs devoted to the subject of technology, what really struck me with roughtype was the insightful analysis of exactly how these technologies stand to change the way we live and interact on a daily basis.

Mr. Carr is a freelance writer who gained notoriety with his publication of The Big Switch, a Wall Street Journal bestseller which discusses the shift to contemporary media, cloud computing, and the concept of Web 2.0. He has also published numerous essays, among them Is Google Making Us Stupid?, which discusses today’s reliance on internet search engines. He also lectures frequently, speaking at such notable institutions as MIT, Harvard, and NASA.

Clearly, Mr. Carr has a firm grasp on the complexities of technology and how they threaten to change life for nearly everyone in the twenty-first century. Roughtype.com was started in 2005, and has been updated by Mr. Carr himself on a very regular basis. Its focus has shifted from early posts relating to the identity and geography of the internet to more recent ones discussing how Apple’s iPhone App Store has erased much of the progress made in universal application creation in the last decade. 

Perhaps one of the best articles to examine Roughtype’s strengths is entitled The Amorality Of Web 2.0, a topic of conversation which dovetails nicely with my own focus. Carr writes that while Web 2.0 inarguably presents numerous benefits to society, there is also a counterargument to be made against the seeming perfection of this new technology. As he writes with regards to Wikipedia:

In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing - it has to be a beautiful thing if the Web is leading us to a higher consciousness. In reality, though, Wikipedia isn't very good at all. Certainly, it's useful - I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject. But at a factual level it's unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn't depend on it as a source, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a student writing a research paper.

He illustrates his point in both a poignant way by citing a portion of Bill Gates’s wiki, which contains nothing but a jumble of confusing factoids. If this is the quality that Web 2.0 has achieved after a rather lengthy gestation – nearly five years in Wikipedia’s case – can we truly believe that it will develop past this mediocrity?

The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity.

Keep in mind that Carr is writing this from his blog, a construct of Web 2.0 which is a part of the very machine he is criticizing. Carr is clearly not afraid of challenging the status quo and questioning the very means by which he expresses his own opinion; a hallmark of good blogging and editorial writing. It is this careful dissection of technologies which many of us have begun to take for granted which serves as great inspiration for my own blog. Carr’s careful analysis and thoughtful editorial creates a blog that is both engaging and eye-opening.

Roughtype.com also explores a varied range of internet-related topics, among them the phenomenon of the avatar, wherein Carr writes about the phenomenon of completely virtual identities.

To hear that people are vain, even obsessively so, is not surprising. Still, though, there's something sad about this - funny-sad, anyway. Your online self ... is entirely self-created, and because it determines your identity and social standing in an internet community, each decision you make about how you portray yourself - about which facts (or falsehoods) to reveal, which photos to upload, which people "to friend," which bands or movies or books to list as favorites, which words to put in a blog - is fraught, subtly or not, with a kind of existential danger. And you are entirely responsible for the consequences as you navigate that danger. You are, after all, your avatar's parents; there's no one else to blame. So leaving the real world to participate in an online community - or a virtual world like Second Life - doesn't relieve the anxiety of self-consciousness; it magnifies it. You become more, not less, exposed.

What is consistent throughout many of his posts is Carr’s elegant and informative critique of each topic at hand. He consistently sets a high standard for both quality of writing and uniqueness of subject, while at the same time giving his blog a reasonably informal and approachable atmosphere. This is exactly what I hope to do in my own writing, and to probe yet deeper into the way Web 2.0 has changed our lives. How has our perception of the world changed? Can this new technology be used to promote interactions we’ve never seen before? Stay tuned.

Hello, world!

Though somewhat cliche, such a title feels oddly appropriate for the first post of a blog on the subject of Web 2.0. This being my first entry, I feel I should explain a bit about who I am, and what I intend to write about over the course of the next fifteen weeks. As you’ve probably noticed from the title of this blog, I intend to write about the mysterious concept of Web 2.0, and how it has (and will) affect the way in which people view the world.

As a student who spent much of his youth in the 1990s, I’ve witnessed first-hand the technological transformation which has occurred with the birth and growth of household computers. Within the last decade, however, an online transformation has occurred which stands to fundamentally alter the way people communicate. Without a doubt, this concept of “Web 2.0” has changed millions of lives around the world, though few seem able to define the term. Perhaps first and foremost, Web 2.0 represents an important step towards realizing the full potential of the internet.

In its infancy, the World Wide Web was largely seen as a way to share otherwise paper-bound information; such transfers could be made over great distances and at lightning speed. Soon after, businesses began to recognize how the concept of ‘Internet’ could change the way they ran their businesses. The Web could not only be used to transfer information, but also to act as a platform for corporations to enhance and further refine the consumer experience.

This new technology promised to revolutionize business, but many of those who invested in Internet-based businesses in the late 1990s – the infancy of the Web – didn’t understand how the internet could (and should) be used to create a valuable consumer experience. Eventually, so great was the interest in the Internet that companies were born on the sole premise of having a website. The frenzy over this new technology was surely warranted, but many failed to recognize its full potential.

It was not until well after the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2000 that a more user-centric version of the Web began to take shape. While early websites were static and often one-dimensional, Web 2.0 recognized that the style and content of webpages could be viewed as distinct entities. The creation of Web 1.0 websites was slow and laborious; Web 2.0 offered the ability for new content to be automatically formatted based on a relatively small amount of code. Indeed, it was perhaps this separation of form and content which proved most pivotal to the success of Web 2.0. Content was now able to be separated from form with ease, creating a user-centric experience that made the internet a communication powerhouse. Users could now interact in ways which did not require an intimate knowledge of computers, opening the doors of internet-based content creation to nearly everyone. It was this realization that provided companies an opportunity to give customers a truly unique user experience.

In recent years, several notable companies have begun to capitalize on the successes of Web 2.0 and the many advantages this technology offers the public. Websites such as Facebook, Youtube, and Flickr offer users the ability to easily upload and share unique content, which in turn can be accessed via a multitude of applications and devices. Wikipedia has been generated solely from the anonymous and unpaid contributions of millions of unique visitors. Twitter relies on nothing but one-hundred-and-forty-character ‘Tweets’ to generate a complex network of trending topics and user relationships. New services such as Google Wave seek to redefine the traditional notion of email through an interactive and collaborative method of message creation and modification.

I’m an avid user of many Web 2.0 applications, and have experienced a complete transformation of the way I communicate in the past decade. Naturally, this piqued my curiosity: how exactly has the phenomenon of Web 2.0 altered the way we view the world and communicate with our friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers? Consequently, what this blog seeks to focus on are the social implications of Web 2.0, and how it continues to transform the way we communicate, learn, and perceive the world. In today’s culture of immediacy and constant change, Web 2.0 plays a crucial role in allowing millions of people to interact and transform the in which information is shared. Over the course of the next fifteen weeks, I’ll analyze these new forms of communication and question the benefit and validity each brings to the platform of social media. How will this new content-driven approach to the internet alter the way in which we communicate? How has it already done so? Who stands to benefit from these changes, and who may be at risk?