There are far more unusually-focused blogs than I can post here, though if you want a more extensive sampling you can visit the same site I did. This is, ironically (and purposefully so), a Blog of Extremely Specific Blogs.
I was going to use this post to describe my tinkering on Flickr (it was prompted by my wanderings on the Flickr blog, which spotlights a "Dogs on Roofs" photo group), but after some reflection I realized that the increasing specialization of the Web is a great example of what Lankshear and Knobel pinpoint in "New Literacies and the Change of Mindsets" as the importance of Discourse communities to the post-industrial mindset of Web 2.0. So I'd like to focus on grappling rather than tinkering, at least for the time being.
For background purposes, the duo explain that using Web 1.0 meant using new technology (like various commercial internet services to buy products) but not yet skills related to new literacy (such as blogging or posting a reader review of a book on Amazon.com). Pre-2001 (the year Lankshear and Knobel identify as paradigm-shifting), computer technology was used "to do 'the same process you've always done, but just more efficiently.'" In education, this might have meant typing the notes to use on an overhead projector rather than writing them in dry-erase marker. Here, technology allows a neater presentation but doesn't change the process of lecturing in any notable way.
According to Jeff Bozos, the emergence of Web 2.0 meant the emergence of an entirely new conception of the Web. This conception relies upon the idea of worldwide, instantaneous, free collaboration between members of Discourse communities. The social networking sites that recently added tinder to the spark of the Jasmine Revolution arose during this period; so, too, did concepts such as personal blogs (instead of personal websites), the invitation of user content by major news outlets (such as CNN's iReporter), and YouTube. We might note the indebtedness of the Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks to this internet revolution. Only with Web 2.0 did the internet become a communal site where user "commenting" could be encouraged (and even solicited, nowadays) on articles in The New York Times.^ The Blog of Extremely Specific Blogs, to cite another example, seems to have relied on user recommendations for specific blogs to then share with the larger Blogger community.
At this point in the entry, Web 2.0 may seem irreproachable. Who doesn't love worldwide, instantaneous, free collaboration? However, I'd like to examine in a little greater detail something Lankshear and Knobel seem to gloss over in "New Literacies and the Change of Mindsets" in their enthusiasm for the World Wide Web. Much of the chapter's praise of 'new' literacies highlights the larger post-industrial mindset of Web 2.0, which (to reiterate) privileges collaborative effort and the power of the consumer over that of the corporation (at least in so far as the corporation deals in tangibles, such as products, and not in services or ideas as a corporation like Google might).* Under such a new information and entertainment market system, Lankshear and Knobel note, "Conventional social relations associated with roles of author/authority and expert have broken down radically under the move from 'publishing' to participation, from centralized authority to mass collaboration, and the like" (L&K 52). In other words, websites were once the domain of expert "authors" who generated content with specialized knowledge. Websites nowadays, too, belong to groups of people who generate content using specialized knowledge; however, these users may also exclusively share content that they have not generated (see Tumblr for an example that takes the form of a whole site) and complicate intellectual property laws in ways that no one, yet, can decisively praise or condemn.
It's clear that Lankshear and Knobel's sympathies lie with the masses and not with The Man. "Publishing" (offset by either necessary or unnecessary quotation marks, depending on your opinion of The Man) is Web 1.0; it's physical text, outmoded. Even worse, it seems, published texts enforce a hierarchy of expert / novice that is also outmoded and designed to maintain the social status quo. "The world of conventional literacies," Lankshear and Knobel note, "remains closely tied to considerations of instrumental value" (L&K 61). In contrast, 'new' literacies contain within them "a world of intrinsic satisfactions" (L&K 61). "There are no royalties to be had there," the authors write, "or, typically, any other public recognition" (L&K 61). Users of Web 2.0, it seems, participate in internet communities (either by producing, sharing, or reviewing content) solely for the love of the game.
The important question that this entry concerns itself with (rather late, it's true) is this: will a post-industrialist mindset hurt or help society in the long run? By which I mean: doesn't everything of quality (or most things of quality) come at some kind of cost? From an educational standpoint, how do we teach students to respect copyright laws in an age in which they're rapidly becoming devalued?
Of course, cost often relates to quality. Though post-industrial Web 2.0 boasts many free resources (no strings attached), its democratic nature means that the range of content (in terms of quality/trash) is quite wide. I derive great enjoyment from many free things on the Web. See blogs above; see also Facebook, Google Reader, Google (in general) and...everything I do on the internet, actually, from looking up new recipes on Vegetarian Times to watching new music videos on YouTube. But these (quality) operations have all developed alternate ways of financing their operations (most through user-specific advertisements for real, industrial products). What of industries such as music and film, which lose billions of dollars every year due to online piracy? What of publishing, which exists now in a kind of liminal space? Sure, I like watching the YouTube video of your sister's niece singing a Christmas carol. It's quite post-industrial. But I also like listening to Watch the Throne in all of its platinum glory. The problem is that, using Web 1.0, I would have paid for the tracks (having been forced to pay for them) and thus given Kanye and Jay-Z recompense for their trouble. Using Web 2.0, I feel less compunction about obtaining that album through other means. And if we stop paying for goods of worth (or paying for quality news journalism, or observing copyright laws for "professional" images and music), they might disappear for good.%
Lankshear and Knobel mention the "relationship revolution" of Web 2.0 as its most important--and revolutionary--attribute. In relation to both educational uses and the social sphere of the internet, I think the prevalence of interest groups on sites like Blogger and Flickr is an overwhelmingly positive aspect of Web 2.0. The student in the classroom is able to assume a new authority that will, in all likelihood, excite her and invest her in her work, while the willingness of people worldwide to collaborate freely in creation of new content and innovation of the old is inspiring. I'm especially partial to Dogs on Roofs, now that I know about it, and I'd be reluctant to retreat to the old Industrial world where users like mark1230us couldn't start the chat thread "wow" -- clarifying with "what a great idea !!!" and, minutes later, "just dogs on the roof !! i understand." This is a real-time epiphany that I can read 22 months later and experience as though it were happening now. Internet specialization turns out to be a very good thing: it allows members of otherwise disparate Discourse communities to find each other and sustain a conversation by sharing photos, music tracks, samples of writing...the list goes on.
However, I also like Kanye. And The New York Times. And I support, in contrast to Lankshear and Knobel, a version of the Web that straddles Industrial and post-Industrial mindsets - if only because I want to enjoy my collaborative blogs about flaming garbage cans in hip hop videos and listen to "published" hip hop albums too.
^Of course, as Lankshear and Knobel remind us in their discussion of atoms and bits, the preposition "in" in this sentence becomes problematic in Web 2.0.
*In consideration of recent user information vending scandals, it's debatable, of course, whether Google actually deals solely in ideas...
%It should be noted that many companies are rising to the challenge of meeting their profit margins, though in necessarily creative ways.
- Title link here (another specialized blog): http://dudekazoo.wordpress.com/
- Photo credit here
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