Web 2.0

This week I read "Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse" by Geert Lovink (online) + "The Machine is Us/ing Us" + "Social Sematics in a Networked Space." Mostly, I was influenced by "The Machine is Us/ing Us," because of the demonstrative manner it had in showing it's content. The video was about web 2.0 and it was viewed by me on web 2.0, it being a youtube video. The video got me thinking, as I'm sure it intended, about the nature of what the internet could become in the future. Furthering these thoughts was "Social Semantics in a Networked Space." The authors' Italian is better than their English, I'm sure, but the points they made were fairly well thought out. Chiefly, the idea of the separation of message and information. The authors describe the message as "how something is written" and the information as "what is written." This to me goes hand in hand with the separation of form and content as discussed in the youtube video mentioned above. In the video, it was demonstrated that the content of a website is programmed independently of form such that the content can seemlessly linked or inserted anywhere. Essentially, the content in this case would be the information, "what is said." This means that the form is the message. If this is the case, then in web 2.0 we are losing the message, the context as it were, and simply seeing the information. This could mean that internet culture and internet communications become contextless. Essentially, the internet would be a place where context has no meaning, or it has every meaning, such that in a communication with a person that the messenger has only internet contact with, information is completely free to flow: free of societally constructed contexts. On the internet, what is considered socially awkward? Is there anything? The beauty of this is that the internet makes the freedom of information truly free. A person can ask anyone at any time anything and can get an answer that is true.