โ Scribed by Consalvo, Mia; Ess, Charles
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Web 2.0" is supposed to represent a new era of online communication in which users generate the content and fortunes may be made on a "dot.com" after all . Of all the platforms taken as examples of Web 2.0, none seems to generate as much attention as social networking sites (SNSs), the domain on which this chapter will focus. MySpace has launched numerous national and regional efforts to legislate online interaction, people have been jailed for creating fake Facebook profiles, and pundits have worried that all of these sites have led the masses to forget the true meaning of "friend."One might begin by questioning how much of Web 2.0 and online social networking is really new. As someone who has been studying online interactions since the early 1990s, I shake my head at the idea that the contemporary Internet is "user generated" while that which preceded it is not. The very phrase "user generated" only makes sense when there is an alternative, in this case something like "professionally generated for profit." Until 1994, this alternative did not exist. On an Internet with no World Wide Web, sponsored by the United States government, all of the content was generated by the people, for the people. We only call Web 2.0 "user generated" because a well-established class of professional content providers now dominates the Internet.As this suggests, one thing that is new about Web 2.0 is that the domains in which people generate their content are now often for-profit enterprises. MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook are the best-known exemplars but are by no means unique. In the early 1990s when users created newsgroups and mailing lists in order to share content, they were the sole beneficiaries. Today when people create content, they continue to benefit, but so too do corporations such as Fox Interactive, Google, and the (as of this writing) privately held Facebook. I will return to this point toward the end of the chapter. For now, let us just note that successful SNS entrepreneurs are doing very well. Facebook sold 1.
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