In the article Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0, Trevor Scholz talks specifically about how the corporate market took over the web and how they have used socially collaborative networks to earn massive amounts of money.
What I found quite interesting is that Scholz talks about how Web 2.0 is not at all new. The internet and those ideologies have been around since the beginning and they are the same ones that apparently are held by Web 2.0; which Trevor Scholz refers to as "new newness." The World Wide Web took over the United States in the early 1900s but Wikis and user-submitted content has been around since 1973, when ARPANET's email program was the most popular feature. What is similar to that is blogs (started in 1994), social networking (Classmates.com was founded already in 1995 which was soon followed by SixDegrees,com), RSS feeds (which allows users to subscribe to a dynamic web site such as a blog, started in 1999), and CSS(creates a consistent approach to providing style information for web documents that started in 1998).
After all of these features were created for the World Wide Web, this where you can see where the corporatization of the web can be seen. The Web makes people easier to use. By "surfing" it, people serve their virtual hosts and they are always happy about it. We are constantly on the World Wide Web and we do not realize how much money corporations are making because of our personal use. We are using the World Wide Web for absolutely everything now. We are using it for banking, social networking, blogging, shopping online, work and education. It is taking over our life and apparently the takeover of the web by business interests is also apparent credible when looking at public discourse.
The most obvious authors that are writing about the Social Web, tend to be lawyers, legal scholars at high end universities, business strategists, and corporate social media consultants. These are the articles that University Students and other people go to when they need legit information that will not be incorrect.
Scholz states, "the users/producers on the Social Web are the base to the super structure of virtual real estate owners." The users of Web 2.0 technology are all contributing to the big corporations who own networks and databases that we use in our everyday lives. We are the little stepping stones that assist on making Web 2.0 so successful and without the social web as an unmarketed project, we probably would not be where we are today.
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