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After the presentation I had an email exchange with Dr. Beth Coleman who is professor in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her research interests include virtual world design and use, networked subjectivity, global media emergence and practice in China, India and Africa, contemporary art and technology, and critical history of race and technology. She blogs at Project Goodluck.

There Beth Coleman followed up on my talk:

Media professor Trebor Scholz gave a talk at MIT last week on Free Cooperation, discussing the ways in which we participate freely in data mining platforms (such as Google and Face Book) and what if means to give free labor to giant commercial enterprises.

He showed us network effect graphs that described the ways in which casual use of a site can turn into a de facto commitment to a platform. He also talked about how online labor exploitation is not visible in the manner that historical industrial labor has been. The centralizing effect of the giant media platforms is a phenomenon that causes him real alarm.

I had a few more questions for him and he nicely agreed to continue the conversation here.

1. Is this inevitable? Going from a mass-media distribution model to a distributed media of the Web, what has happened to the ability to choose? There are alternatives to Youtube?? Why does this site dominate? Is it design or social (the aggregating of people).

2. There is no precedent for participatory networks at this scale. So the rules of ownership in regard to what one makes or even of one's personal information are not clear. The eula [end users agreement] for most sites say that the user give up all rights to content. If we are seeing a centralizing movement that reflects in effect our own use habits, how do we reverse this momentum?

3. This free work is the opposite of what was meant by free software and open source initiatives a decade ago. Do user’s rights need to be mandated at the level of law to prevent our herding instincts from helping to create de facto media monopoly? Does this destroy the progressive and innovative aspects of Web agency that someone like Y. Benkler has applauded in Wealth of Networks?

Trebor Scholz:

Why do people congregate in very large numbers in very few places? People want to be where other people are. I learn from my friends on Facebook (FB) through the newsfeed and from my network on Del.icio.us. Knowledge is created among us, laterally. D. Weinberger calls it the Daily We. I can see what my FB friends (people whom I met at conferences or with whom I am otherwise acquainted) bookmark, read, which events they put on, and which groups they associate themselves with. I'm certainly not alone-- these reasons motivate many of the 70 million people who are on Facebook.

Business plans for startups are based on a very low threshold for participation, uploading is made very easy. People contribute videos, blog entries, wall posts, bookmarks, status updates, and photos but none of this material can be exported. An active user becomes more valuable over time, not unlike a bottle of wine in the wine cellar. All those “friends” with whom we reconnect, sometimes after quite some time, and all those media and texts are literally locked up. Try to delete Flickr photos (you’ll have to go one by one; try that with the 2 GB that you just uploaded). Or, try deleting your Facebook (FB) account. You can't. Attempt to export blog entries on MySpace or photos on Facebook. Not accidentally, the export option does not exist. Groups are locked up in these social milieus. Weak-tie-communities are entrapped; it's a corporate confiscation of attention, creativity, and time. Steve Chen, co-founder of Youtube understands how much he owes the "community" when he thanks Youtube users shortly after being acquired by Google for $1.6 billion. Chen: “Thanks to everyone of you guys that have been contributing to YouTube, to the community. We would not be anywhere close to where we are without the help of this community.” Within three years the site had achieved popularity and that user community directly translated into Google stocks.

Users who "flirt" with a given site are attracted by the wealth of user-submitted content. Bigger is better. It's the network effect: the more people use a technology, the more valuable it becomes. Fax machines don’t get you very far if only 5 people use them. Equally, you'll not reconnect with your high school sweetheart on an obscure startup social networking site. You will also not find many photos with an uncommon tag on a photo site other than Flickr. User-submitted content makes these sites so attractive. The top ten site of the Web share 40% of all web traffic (sina.com, baidu.com, yahoo.com, msn.com, google.com, youtube.com, myspace.com, live.com, orkut.com, qq.com). These sites disproportionally control the networked public sphere because of the user-submitted content, which makes their social milieus so intensely engaging. Yochai Benkler refers to this mass-media-like constellation of media monopoly as the "Berlusconi Effect." The democratizing effects that Benkler described in Wealth of Networks in 1995 have little to do with user-generated content. He focuses on the remaining 60% web traffic made up in part of blogs that spread reports showing the shortcoming of Diebold's voting machines.

I think that Benkler's sometimes criticized utopian enthusiasm for peer production is justified when it comes to initiatives like Wikipedia or even Google Adsense that allows individuals to supplement their income.   

 Sure, there are endless alternatives to the MyTubes and YouSpaces of the World Wide Computer. But good luck trying to migrate your data and friend lists with you. YouTube is attractive because of those 70,000 uploads a day (and counting). It's very difficult to migrate data to another site. Interoperability is largely an illusion. Users can reconnect with high school friends and those dozens of people would not all move with the potential migrating users. The loss would be significant. My hope is that exportability will become a competitive advantage for Social Web companies.

The American site Orkut dominates Brazil and India completely. Canada hearts Facebook. MySpace and FB reign supreme in the United States. How do these sites become the default? Some researchers suggest that it has to do with the colors of the interface or with a celebrity joining the site. (This is not so different to a real estate agency that spreads the news that the R&B singer and songwriter Beyoncé will buy a duplex in a newly erected building.) But then, soon, once a solid number of users is established, the wealth of social life will be the attraction. Good design cannot have much to with it: just look at MySpace and its disastrous interface.

Yochai Benkler correctly suggests that "peer production is as efficient and significant for the 21 century as the assembly line was for the 20th century." I also agree with Benkler when he suggests that through peer production "people can do more by and for themselves" but I add that the pleasures of online sociality are exploited. Communities are often deceived and commodified. They are unfairly used as a resource, often without their consent and knowledge. It's a bit like Mark Twain's "Whitewashing the Fence" in Tom Sawyer.

Tom tries to motivate the neighborhood boys to paint the fence for him. His friend Ben rejects the offer to paint the fence without pay. Tom responds “What do you call work?” and resumes his whitewashing:

“Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer.”
“Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?”

The brush continued to move.

“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”

That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple:

“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”

Online the promise of the free service is subtler than Tom Sawyer's boyish box of manipulating tricks.
The surplus attention of people, diverted from television to the Internet, translates into many hours every day spent on social networking sites. (For Myspace that meant an increase in value from $ 583 million in 2005 to $15 billion in 2008.)

I disagree with Benkler when he proposes social peace: "The key is managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker." How can big businesses like NewsCorp can get away with exploiting communities. From a business perspective, the question is how you a company can find people to make a living with. How can they harvest the labor and presence of those millions on Myspace, for example, without making them feel bad? This is also an underlying question for Don Tapscott in Wikinomics when he celebrates that "In Second Life, the consumer actually co–innovates and coproduces the products they consume." (Tapscott and Williams, 2007. Wikinomics, p. 126).

Companies like LindenLab, while granting users IP-rights to their creations in the virtual world SecondLife, make profits without providing anything but the technical backbone, the real estate for all this creativity and flying around. The ownership issues of submitted content are handled in favor of the user here. But perhaps that simply shows that the content does not matter so much. Since Howard Rheingold's Electric Minds, companies have learned have learned that user-submitted content is very rarely what makes money. Today, the platform zars realize that it's about attention; it's about time spent in an environment and about the data that can be sucked out of the user clicks.  

Benkler, Lessig, Sunstein and others are looking at these issues as lawyers. Their contributions are important but they respond to questions that are relevant to the legal community. I approach the issues from the cultural activist perspective.  

Is centralization avoidable? Is it a new phenomenon? User-submitted or generated content such as book reviews are not new (very much in opposition to what Web 2.0 ideologues wants you to believe). Benkler argues for the Web as a place where ordinary people can find a voice but it is not a novel trend. Personal email was a sneaky and by all means unplanned use of ARPANET. Amazon.com's review submission feature started in 1995 as an early form of self-publishing. The Indian social networking site Sulekha kicked off in 1999.  The participatory turn, the shock of the social, and groundswell of sociality online-- whatever you want to call this quantitative leap of participation in web-based social milieus-- it is new.  

Is the "Berlusconi Effect" avoidable on the Social Web? The history of radio would be a discouraging precedent. From a plethora of individual radio operators, airwave politics made sure that only the highest-paying stations would survive. Debates about net neutrality immediately enter my mind. A two-tiered Internet would be the kiss goodnight for decentralization. But recent news made me hopeful.   As it stands now, bloggers like Dailykoz or curated sites like Boingboing still exist and they are A-list sites in terms of traffic. They get a good share of the remaining 60% of traffic and that is worth defending.

Web 2.0 is not just a viral term used to describe the broad set of techno-social changes on the Web; it is also a general way of looking at things, an ideology. This ideology is a set of ideas that was proposed by the founder of a large technology publishing house, Tim O’Reilly, in 2004. While some of his propositions are accurate, others, which are suggested (but largely remain untold) have to be discredited. This essay will first trace back the term, situate it, and then make the ahistoricity of this branding effort transparent.

The Power of Naming
Public discourse is controlled by those who manage to manipulate the language of the debate. In 2006, "Web 2.0" was the Wikipedia article with the highest number of incoming, external links. The Web 2.0 Ideology is a marketing tool that falsely reframes the steady evolution of the Web as a sudden explosion, a big bang of techno-social components that were then collected under the conceptual umbrella of the newly created brand. While the Web 2.0 concept was initially criticized, the market logic that it proposes as common-sensensical, remains largely unchallenged. Entrepreneurs welcome the term, amateurs thought that they were learning something, pragmatists surrendered, while a few others are looking for less ideologically charged language. O'Reilly's branding idea, associated with radical novelty, sells books and tickets to events but most importantly, it has the potential to excite venture capitalists, not completely unlike the years of the dot-com mania.

Web 2.0
The ideas associated with the Web 2.0 brand were often discussed. In October 2004, the term was coined by Tim O’Reilly and his colleague John Battelle. Both men brainstormed the topical focus of an upcoming conference about the Web, came up with the term and trademarked it. Two years later, at a UC Berkeley commencement speech, Tim O'Reilly said:

    "If history is any guide, the democratization promised by Web 2.0 will eventually be succeeded by new monopolies, just as the democratization promised by the personal computer led to an industry dominated by only a few companies. Those companies will have enormous power over our lives -- and may use it for good or ill."

    "At a more foundational level of collective understanding, the shift from an industrial to a networked information economy increases the extent to which individuals can become active participants in producing their own cultural environment. It opens the possibility of a more critical and reflective culture (130)."

    "The networked information economy makes individuals better able to do things for and by themselves, and makes them less susceptible to manipulation by others than they were in the mass-media culture. In this sense, the emergence of this new set of technical, economic, social, and institutional relations can increase the relative role that each individual is able to play in authoring his or her own life (130)."

 
Talk of novelty is equally misplaced when it come to wikis. Ward Cunningham installed WikiWikiWeb on the Internet in 1995. And the first version of RSS, a format for syndicating content, was created by Netscape in 1999.

Application Programming Interface (API) is an additional technology at the core of Web 2.0. APIs  interconnect websites just like a door way through which people with the right “key” can pass; they facilitate the link between one computer program and another. Open APIs allow programmers to write applications that access the rich databases at Google, Facebook or Yahoo.  In the past, companies protected their APIs like treasures. But more recently, they decided to share their APIs, allowing developers to build their own hybrid mash-up software. Frappr, for example, uses GoogleMaps and adds layers of conversations on top of them.

Hardly the latest marker of the evolution of the Web, Extensible Markup Language (XML) facilitates the sharing of data across different systems on the Internet. XML 1.0 became a “W3C Recommendation” already in 1998.

Folksonomy, however, was popularized in 2004. It stands for collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, social tagging. It is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. While the Web has always been social, the scale of participation is new. It did not, however, explode over night but was the result of the steady growth of the Web. Today, online participation is made easier because of increased familiarity, easier-to-use tools and broader access to bandwidth and technologies.

Also new is the term AJAX, first coined by Jesse J. Garrett in 2005. It means that Javascript is now working in a way that allows web-based applications to function much like traditional desktop software. AJAX makes web pages feel more responsive by exchanging only small amounts of data with the server so that one does not have to reload the entire web page, each time when requesting a change. While the term AJAX is new, it uses a set of decade-old, existing technologies.

While neither user-generated content, XML, RSS, wikis, blogs, CSS, the network effect, or social networking sites were new in 2004, it is correct that folksonomies as well as the current scale of participation are indeed new.

The Web 2.0 Ideology
Web 2.0 ideologues say that control is bad but in fact control is only increasing as Lawrence Lessig warns us in his book Code 2.0. Other abreviations of this rethoric include: openness--good, authority--bad, hierarchy--bad, and amateur creativity--good.

With Web 2.0, services, rather than products are offered and users are encouraged to participate. Architectures of participation allow networked publics to achieve what Pierre Levy called Collective Intelligence. Networked individuals refer each other to useful content. They page rank, tag, follow and "unfollow." The line between amateur and professional gets blurred when users collaborate to write blogs and wiki entries. Users tag content online and therefore in many cases editorial classification is made unnecessary.

The claim of the relinquishing of control, an essential part of the Web 2.0 ideology, is a myth as William Blaze argues:

    "What separates the Web 2.0 from that plain old "web" is the establishment and entrenchment of a hierarchy of power and control. This is not the same control that Microsoft, AOL and other closed system/walled garden companies tried unsuccessfully to push upon internet users. Power in the Web 2.0 age comes not from controlling the whole system, but in controlling the connections in a larger network of systems. It is the power of those who create not open systems, but semi-open systems, the power of API writers, network builders and standard definers."

This is a draft of a chapter and not a finished essay. Citations will be added. The slides of two presentations about this material are available: part 1, part 2. You can also download a .pdf of a linear time line (zoom in).

Please send corrections or comments to trebor@thing.net (updated last:  October 23, 2007)

Networked sociality did, of course, not start with the Internet. Tom Standage in "The Victorian Internet" compares the history of the telegraph to that of the net by talking about geographically distributed telegraph operators who were dating each other after hours. With a telegraph cable connecting the United States and Europe, communication across the Atlantic was easy, people believed in the end of all wars. Standage describes the information overload and widespread euphoria that were associated with the Internet, already occurring with the implementation of the telegraph.
Neither the telegraph nor the telephone were the only means of networked communication leading up to computer-assisted person-to-person communication via the net but this pre-history is extensively covered in the literature on the history of communication.

This essay now "fastforwards" through history, tracing main ideas that were crucial in the evolution of networked sociality online. Famously, in 1945 the American computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the idea of hyperlinked pages and the “Memex,” (knowledge on call), which were fundamental for the World Wide Web. Bush conceived of the "Memex" as "an enlarged intimate supplement to [man's] memory." Four years later, in his novel Heliopolis, the German author Ernst Jünger dreams up the communication medium "Phonophor," which he describes as connecting everybody to everybody else, enabling a permanent, technically facilitated forum that also replaces the newspaper, library, and encyclopedia.

Such anticipation of interaction and participatory cultures were also present in the arts. John Cage's three-movement piece 4'33" premiered in 1952, given by David Tudor at Woodstock in upstate New York. This widely known and often cited piece, performed for four minutes and thirty three seconds was related to Cage's experience at Harvard University's isolation chamber where he was able to listen to the sound of the blood in his body circulating. It is widely known that Cage considered the quotidian sounds, the sounds that surround us, as music. The audience in performances of 4'33" is activated and unintentionally becomes part of the piece in so far as the noises that they themselves are making become part of the work. In 1957 Allan Kaprow first coined the term "happening" and referred to it as a performance, event or situation. Happenings were meant to be art, often lacked a narrative, could take place anywhere and sought to involve the audience. Wikipedia cites Kaprow’s piece 18 Happenings in 6 Parts as the first happening. According to the art historian Claire Bishop

"[A]ctivation; authorship; community -- are the most frequently cited motivations for almost all artistic attempts to encourage participation in art since the 1960s."

"We believe that we are entering into a technological age, in which we will be able to interact with the richness of living information -- not merely in the passive way that we have become accustomed to using books and libraries, but as  active participants in an ongoing process, bringing something to it through our interaction with it, and not simply receiving something from it by our connection to it."

"We cautiously connected and the bits began to flow. The pieces really functioned just why I still don't know.  Messages are moving pretty well by Wednesday morn. All the rest is history, packet switching had been born."

“It was the first, and being the first, as best,
But now we lay it down to ever rest.”

"a new faith [that] has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley." "Promoted in magazines, books, TV programs, Web sites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies."

Social Bookmarking
List.com, the first shared online bookmarking system started up and ICQ (Instant Messaging Computer Program) was released and Brewster Kahle launches the non-profit organization The Internet Archive. Also in 1995, the Asian American community site AsianAvenue.com kicked off (without social networking features at the time) and Yahoo!Personals started as online dating service. In the same year, Pattie Maes (MIT), together with engineers at her Lab, builds one of the first music recommendation systems called HOMR (or Helpful Online Music Recommendation Service), one of the first collaborative music filtering and referral systems preceding services like Last.fm, Jango or Pandora. In 1996, Rhizome.org was founded with the goal to “provide a platform for the global new media art community.” The ArtBase is Rhizome's rich online archive, predominantly of net art projects.

Also in 1996 Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive started the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine originally referred to a machine from the cartoon The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show in which Mr. Peabody and Sherman would be taken back in time. The Wayback Machine is used to visit web pages from 1996 to the a few months ago that may no longer be available. By 2007, 85 billion web pages are archived.

In 1996 Manuel Castells (b. 1942) publishes the first volume in the trilogy Information Age, titled The Rise of the Information Society. Castells writes that the

“most decisive historical factor accelerating, channeling and shaping the information technology paradigm, and inducing its associated social forms, was/is the process of capitalist restructuring undertaken since the 1980s, so that the new techno-economic system can be adequately characterized as informational capitalism” (p18).

 He argued that in contemporary society dominant functions and processes are increasingly organized around networks.

Only one year later Rob Malda (a.k.a CmdrTaco, b. 1976) launched Slashdot, the first weblog allowing readers to comment and the term "weblog" was coined the American blogger Jorn Barger. Barger (b. 1952) ultimately complains that coining this term did not lead to personal financial gain for him. The lack of commercial promise that blogs offered at the time was the reason that they did not get much initial mainstream attention.

The University of Ottawa professor Pierre Levy published his book Collective Intelligence, which investigated the affordances of networked sociality, describing an intelligence that emerges from the collaboration, competition of many individuals working on one task.

The massive scaling-up of online sociality and the emergence participatory cultures made this a consequential book. In 1997, David Garcia and Geert Lovink defined Tactical Media as "what happens when the cheap ‘do it yourself’ media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture." By 2002 Tactical Media Labs had been started in Amsterdam, Sydney, Cluj, Barcelona, Delhi, New York, Singapore, Birmingham, Nova Scotia, Berlin, Chicago, Portsmouth, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Dubrovnik, and Zanzibar. In 2004 the Mídia Tática group in Sao Paolo (Tatiana Wells and Ricardo Rosas) established several AutoLabs in this context trying to help the urban poor to use the new resources of the Internet for their own ends.

In 1998 the business-centered social networking site Ecademy starts up and Evite launches as a website for creating, sending, and managing online invitations. Also at this early point, the Indian social networking site Sulekha was set into motion. Playahead, a large Internet community mainly for Swedish teenagers, was founded in Helsingborg, Sweden in 1998 and claims to have 1 million members in 2007. ECrush, today the 10th largest dating site in the United States, was launched in 1999 pre-dating the social networking sites like Friendster, MySpace and Facebook. Sulekha and Playahead show that the early history of social networking was not solely an American affair.

In the same year DMOZ, also known as The Open Directory Project, is founded under the name GnuHoo. Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation objected to the usage of Gnu because GnuHoo was a commercial enterprise founded by two SunMicroSystems employees. Consequently, the name GnuHoo was changed to NewHoo. NewHoo/DMOZ/Open Directory Project involves geographically distributed individuals to evaluate websites, creating a user-powered search engine. In October 1999 the number of URLs indexed by ODP reached one million (about 1.6 million by 2000 and four million by 2003). By March 2007 75,151 editors have contributed. The project is later bought by Netscape, which was then acquired by AOL. Volunteer editors lived through "a short-lived attempt by the company at moderation of the ODP Editor Forums, but this effort was abandoned as being the antithesis of the egalitarian principles on which the ODP community was supposed to be based." There are several example in which editors who questioned editing guidelines had their editing privileges removed by paid staff.

The French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud published Relational Aesthetics engaging with the possibility of "relational art" based on the practices of artists who became visible during the 1990s. Concurrently, the German researcher Peter Hoschka introduced the term Social Web.

In 1999, Rusty Foster creates kuro5hin (pronounced "corrosion"), a weblog where users vote for the content that goes onto the front page. The computer programmer Shawn Fanning (b. 1980) writes Napster at Northeastern University with his friend Sean Parker. Users of Napster could download the free program to search the hard disks of other users for Mp3 files, which could then be downloaded directly from those peers. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster in December 1999, which was followed by the heavy metal band Metallica filing a lawsuit against the company in 2000. During the last months of Napster’s operation in 2001, several other file-sharing programs emerged including Kazaa and Gnutella, which allowed users to continue to share music files. Napster was important as it established expectations-- information wants to be free. It demonstrated the power of peer-to-peer systems (i.e., in August 2001 alone, 3.1 billion files were exchanged via Napster).

In the same year Pyra Labs start Blogger.com, and social networking sites including Tribe, Xanga, Blackplanet launch. By 2007 the latter will have 16 million users, mainly African Americans.

The DotCom Crash and Massive Offshoring
Throughout the 1990s, California became the center of the biggest economic boom since the gold rush of 1848 that brought some 300,000 people from all over the world. In the 1990s many highly skilled Indian programmers started to work for dotcom companies twelve thousand miles away from Silicon Valley, in Bangalore. Silicon Valley weas responsible for 13% of the new American jobs created between 1996 and 2000. In 1995, the cross-platform software language JAVA, a "building material" for software, was written at SunMicro Systems, named after coffee, Silicon Valley's favorite beverage.

All of this happened against the backdrop of a starting backlash of technology stocks in the financial markets, which indicated what later became known as the Dotcom Crash. The flashy WebbyAwards exemplify the “dotcom bubble”. Since 1995, it brought together thousands of people in costumes, with hired faux-paparazzi to make people feel important. The Internet was predicted to be the quick replacement of the post office, the fast way to cash in on markets all over the world. The perceptions of the evolution of markets on the Web were exaggerated. Venture capitalists (VC) poured millions into companies that had given up traditional business models, which led to some spectacular failures. For two years, 2001 and 2002, investment in startups was at a minimum. In 2003 Accel, a leading venture capital started funding startup businesses again. Accel's president James Breyer demanded that Accel companies need to have at least half of their workers based overseas. He said:

"If a company is not actively investing in China and India, they need to provide a very compelling case to board members as to why they are not."

In the years after the dotcom crash, the parking lots of Silicon Valley were empty and programmers took jobs with much lower wages in the non-profit area, creating open source software.  

The Rise of Citizen Media
IndyMedia launched during the protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in November 1999. The motivation for its creation was the realization that the media would not accurately report demonstrations of the pro-democratic globalization movement. Indymedia made a difference by allowing anyone to write the news. It became an early example of participatory citizen media, offering an alternative to corporate media. Today, Indymedia sites all over the world use Mir, a JAVA-based open-source content management system. Consequently it became clear that the Internet was a valuable tool for organizing, fundraising, lobbying, and community building.

Also in 1999, the RTMark site kicked off. “RTMark is itself a registered corporation which brings together activists who plan projects with donors who fund them. It thus operates outside the laws governing human individuals, and benefits from the much looser laws governing corporations.” RTMark was participatory in the sense that it functions as matchmaker between anti-corporate activists and anti-corporate donors leading to projects such as the Barbie Liberation Organization.

In 2000, the international online artistic community DeviantArt, the social networking site Faceparty, and IRC-Galleria launched. The latter will become the largest web-based virtual community in Finland. Faceparty, which has 5.9 million users in 2007, mainly focuses on British teens and 20-somethings. The peer-to-peer file sharing application Kazaa was created that year and the South Korean social news site OhMyNews launches. Despite the international accessibility of social networking sites like Faceparty, their actual user-group is often very specific to a geographic region and even age group. 

In December, the private, non-commercial working group RSS-Dev Group released its RSS 1.0 specification, allowing users to "feed" or "aggregate" websites in a so called RSS aggregator, a piece of software allowing them to follow changes such as new posts on many websites at once without actually having to visit them.   

In 2001, the MIT Sociable Media Group was formed and several vital mailing lists launched including SPECTRE ("an unmoderated mailing list for media art and culture in Deep Europe") and the list of The Association of Internet Researchers.

The terrorist suicide attacks of September 11, 2001 led to a widespread change in approaches of the US government to privacy, including the installation of the FBI's email surveillance system known as "Carnivore” on many Internet Service Providers.

A dropout of the State University of New York at Buffalo, Bram Cohen (b. 1975) later developed the peer-to-peer file sharing communications protocol BitTorrent, which is first implemented on July 2, 2001. Cohen designed BitTorrent to be able to speed up the download time, especially for users with fast download and upload speeds. The more popular a file is, the faster a user will be able to download it. In 2007, according to Cohen, BitTorrent has 135 million installs and accounts for 55 percent of all Internet traffic.

The Amateur/Expert
Concurrently, social networking sites like Cyworld Sites, DeadJournal, Frühstückstreff, Passado, and Ryze are created. Former editor-in-chief of Nupedia and Citizendium founder Larry Sanger (b. 1968) and the American Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales (b. 1966) create Wikipedia in 2000/2001. Wikipedia's spectular success demonstrates the power of collective intelligence and also took away a certain amount of power from established experts who are not the sole authorities anymore.

In addition, the weblog publishing system Movable Type was released. Around the same time political scientist Robert D. Putnam publishes Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, describing the decline of social capital in the United States. In the US, he describes the decline in civic participation, religious participation (churches), civic participation, altruism, reciprocity, workplace participation (union membership declines), informal connections, and political participation (voting, running for office). While Putnam's definition of social capital is problematic and his examples are old-fashioned, he does notice the mentioned decline of social capital but simultaneously describes a rapid growth of small niche communities and self-help groups.

Scott Heiferman (co-founder of the social networking site Meetup.com) traces the inspiration to create Meetup.com in 2002 back to Putnam's book. "The primary inspiration was the book Bowling Alone... We are providing a service that revitalizes the Internet for local communities." The site became especially know for its role in Howard Dean's presidential campaign. In 2005 Meetup.com requires organizers to pay for local groups leading to a drastic drop in local groups but in 2007 it still has two million users.

Also in 2002 social sites like Friendster and the Hungarian social networking site iWiW started. The social networking site Last.fm (based on music) set a positive standard for privacy and transparency by stating in their Terms of Service in 2002.

“We have a pretty simple privacy policy. We are reasonably sure this won't piss anyone off. We won't pass your email address on to anyone, not even Lars Ulrich at gunpoint. Your pseudonymous listening habit data will be available to other Last.fm users for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license. ... We reserve the right to sell or license pseudonymous listening data for commercial use ...”

“This young man had spiked multi-colored hair, full-body tattoos, and multiple piercings in his ears. An obvious slacker, I thought, probably in a band. 'So what is your story?' I asked. 'Hey man, I just signed on with these guys.' ... This young man and his lifestyle proclivities represent a profound new force in the economy and life of America. He is a member of what I call the creative class: a fast growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and economic growth increasingly depend. Members of the creative class do a wide variety of work in a wide variety of industries--from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts. They do not consciously think of themselves as a class. Yet they share a common ethos that values creativity, individuality, difference, and merit.”

“Precarious work refers to all possible shapes of unsure, not guaranteed, flexible exploitation: from illegalized, seasonal and temporary employment to homework, flex- and temp-work to subcontractors, freelancers or so called self employed persons.”

"DeWolfe learned that people will sign up for almost anything that they find useful, and they could care less about the fine print." Spam became a central "feature" of MySpace,which, in 2006, makes it abundantly clear that "the company has 'a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license ... to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute' all content uploaded to their site.”