deuxlits

i haven’t posted in ages as i have hermetically sealed myself off for awhile as i took some time off and started working on some writing pieces. one thing that has struck me over the past week or so as i’ve started delving more deeply into the rhetoric of web 2.0 is the lack of understanding of how individuals actually use many of these applications. i know there has been a significant interst in social networking sites as one avenue of research in this  area, however if we understand web 2.0 as a series of  applications that serve as inclusive platforms that facilitate participation and engagement, one thing that has struck me is how little we actually know about how the ways which people participate and engage. a lot of the cursory research operates on an ideological level that criticizes the potentially exploitative nature of these applications as ownership of this information does not necessarily rest in the hands of those who create it.  i think this is most apparent in discussions of “collective intelligence” and metaphors of “hive” mind since in a hive colony there are only two status ranks: the queen and the workers.

having just read david weinberger’s “everything is miscellenous,” i was struck by how a lot of his argumentation is predicated on an *ideal* scenario of free flowing information that allows everyone’s voice to be represented; that allows for all informational needs to be fulfilled and shared. and as someone who subscribes to these ideals, i couldn’t help but react by asking myself “so is this really what’s happening? are websites like myspace, wikipedia, facebook, flickr, twitter, blogs et al creating embedded structural shifts in the traditional social and political hierarchies?” in a lot of ways, the rhetoric that surrounds the current state of social software echoes similar notions in the belief in free-market capitalism and so borrowing from economic discourse, one particular indicator of a healthy democracy is the existence of a stable and middle class…so what would a digital middle class look like? i recall a wired article a while back on some work in myspace and the music industry that put forward the idea that myspace allowed for the growth in a kind of musical middle class that destabilized the previous hierarchies in the industry that concentrated profits in the major record labels.

so from a broader web 2.0 information perspective, what would a middle class user look like? how would we know it if we saw it? would there even be much difference between the digital middle class and “non-digital” middle class? it’s still unclear what exactly this kind of groups looks and would look like as it seems as if most research has focused on heavy users as we try to understand the potential boundaries of what these technologies can do. a recent pew report providing a typology of information users had some really interesting findings about “middle of the road users” and those with few technological assets, in contrast to elite users. what i think i most interesting is the varying attitudes towards of technology across the range of users as they reflect uneven perceptions of benefits and interest. given this,  i think it would be really helpful to get some kind of deep-rooted understanding of where these kinds of cleavages occurs.