Nedko

In the era of disposable mobile phones, the battery-powered five razor blades and on demand reality TV it seems we’ve pushed the boundaries of technology to the next level. However often with such change we don’t take into consideration the social implications that these new concepts can have on our life. Likewise the explosion of web content and exposure to the masses triggered a new, more global renaissance (French, from Middle French, rebirth, from Old French renaistre to be born again) of the modern technological world and it all happened in cyberspace.

Web 2.0 is often misunderstood and mistaken for something that it’s not. Neither the number nor the term itself were intended at signifying a new technology or a different standard. Rather, Web 2.0 is more of a phenomenon or a concept which describes the second generation of the web. It’s all about collaboration, sharing, social networking, building virtual communities. It’s about traversing spaces rather than data. About information filtering rather than gathering. Some go even further to describe Web 2.0 as the A.D. of the web and the Internet. While i am not sure of the extent to which I am willing to glorify the conceptual change we are experiencing I am wiling to admit: it is a breakthrough to revolutionize the way we use technology and think of time and space. Intended as a mere collection of academic papers and scientific documents, the Internet was by definition a collaboration tool. In ways a little too advanced for the age it was observed as an equivalent of a library where as we all know we enter the title of interest, go through the results much like the library index cards and once we found the desired content we checked it out. That was then. It will take almost 14 years for our brains to understand the value and capabilities of the invention of the Web (aka World Wide Web or WWW for short). That was the exact time it took Tim Berners-Lee to be awarded the Millennium Technology Prize and signify the importance of his invention. Now we traverse spaces, communities, collaborate and introduce new ways of communication and interaction.

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