By Tim Butterfield
In essence, every young person in America has become, in the literal sense, a public figure. And so they have adopted the skills that celebrities learn in order not to go crazy; enjoying the attention instead of fighting itand doing their own publicity before somebody does it for them. (Nussbaum 2007, p. 7). Web 2.0 has moved away from the limitations of one-way communication and now is all about user participation and interaction. In Web 2.0, You become the designer, the director and the author. It can include sites such as ebay, myspace and facebook. This may sound impressive and inviting but what effects could this have on our communication? This paper will discuss whether web 2.0 signals a radical generational shift in how people relate to the divide between private and public space. Is the shift a desirable thing, what pitfalls and benefits might it have?
What is Web 2.0? Dearstyne, (2007) defines it as a perceived second generation of web-based services, such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies, that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users." Web 2.0 is participatory, collaborative, inclusive, creator-/user-centric unsettled, and very information-intensive. Three particularly important types of Web 2.0 tools are Blogs, Mashups and Wikis. Blogs are user-generated web journals that offer opinions and information such as text, images and links. Mashups are websites or other applications that integrate content from more than one source into an integrated application, such as combining data on a topic of interest. Wikis allows visitors to add, remove, edit any number of pages on a website. This is an effective tool to generate mass collaborative authoring (Dearstyne, 2007). Web 2.0 is available to anyone with an internet connection. To participate in Web 2.0 sites such as ebay, myspace and facebook, usually requires some form of registration with the site. This can be free or cost a small registration fee.
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