The Evolution of a Cyber Revolution

It was with a slightly less butterfly-filled stomach that I Confidently strode through the doors to my second JOUR1111 lecture and took my place. One week at uni had not done much in the way of becoming used to this new life, but I knew now at least where the lecture theatre was.

The topic of week 2’s lecture explored the multileveled nature of our internet and its progression over the past decade or more. This topic, I found particularly interesting, as, young though I may be, even I remember the days when we would carefully type a URL into the large white box-like objects that were computers not so very long ago. Personally I would wait in innocent suspense as the jigs and reels of some infinite cyberspace laboriously conjured up a website. This (which at the time was seemingly miraculous information) basically defines the extent of web 1.0. A collection of pages filled with information as a means of showing and promoting it in a public viewing environment. So far, this was the stone age of the web development.

With the arrival of web 2.0 however, the lines between ‘using’ and ‘producing’ internet content began to blur. This was the era of communication and social networking via the web. Now we were interacting through it, posting on it and socialising in it, simultaneously producing and consuming content. After feeling severely deprived and ignorant of all the social network jargon surrounding me, I finally resigned to the necessity of having a facebook account. At first it was a burden, having to upload photos, and write posts, but soon enough I was a fully qualified ‘prod-user’.

We are now on the verge of web 3.0, which focuses on the individual. While we could interact ‘through’, ‘on’ and ‘in’ web 2.0, to an extent we interact with web 3.0. With a focus on the individual, it combines webs 2 and 3 to compose meaning from multilayered demands. Not only does it use one’s location, but it functions based on personalised tastes, specified prices and previous web activity. Businesses can market directly to the individual based on the web’s ability to single out products we may be interested in. Thus, web 3.0 has been dubbed the ‘semantic web’, a web which analyses and interprets to deliver the desired result.

Web Progression: From Web Design Blog (2010)

So what does this web progression mean for the future of news media and us journalists? Basically, it means we are soon to be deprived of what we currently see as rightfully our own (to help us understand this concept, we were given unrestrained access to a bag of jelly beans, then deprived from them for a total of two minutes; a highly traumatic experience). In addition to the web, lecture 3 explained the platforms of old and new media; old media being traditional platforms developed in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries – newspaper, magazines, radio and television, and new media being online news and web services. With the progression of the web, companies have diverted their news to free and highly accessible online articles in addition to newspapers. However, with the arrival of web 3.0, these websites have already, or will soon be going behind the pay wall. The sudden demand to pay for what has always been free is predictably not met with approval by most users. 

Along with these demands for compensation, come promises of more than the usual online article. News will become personalised and centralised, to the point where we can receive news relevant only to ourselves and the place we live. While the obliteration of all that irrelevant to us may seem appealing at first, hyper localisation and ethnocentricity can be disadvantageous. Ignorance of dealings outside one’s own street coupled with a belief that your house is the earth’s metropolis can never be helpful if we wish to remain fully functional social beings. But possible ‘advantages’ aside, will people pay for something they feel entitled to? If not, journalists can continue writing articles out of the goodness of their hearts, but imbursement will not follow. Thus the question is raised; is entitlement the death of journalism? The answer to this is yet to be revealed.

After watching the progression of the web over the space of a few years, I wonder what is yet to come in the way of the webs. What new and as of yet, unimagined abilities is the web yet to adopt?

A quick google search of ‘web 4.0’ reveals 'a future where technology and human become one' (2008) a startling prospect, but then again, all new concepts begin with a seeming impossibility. Though web 3.0 may seem ‘the’ pinnacle of web creation, I beg to differ. Innovation and development never cease, and simply because we’ve ‘got-it-good’ now, does not mean we don’t ‘want it better’.