La revista First Monday publica este mes de marzo (vol. 13, num. 3) un número especial titulado «Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0» que incluye los siguientes artículos:

• Preface: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0
  Michael Zimmer
• Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0
  Trebor Scholz
• Web 2.0: An argument against convergence
  Matthew Allen
• Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0
  Kylie Jarrett
• Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation
  Søren Mørk Petersen
• The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0
  Michael Zimmer
• Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance
  Anders Albrechtslund
• History, Hype, and Hope: An Afterward
  David Silver

En la introducción Michael Zimmer escribe:

Web 2.0 represents a blurring of the boundaries between Web users and producers, consumption and participation, authority and amateurism, play and work, data and the network, reality and virtuality. The rhetoric surrounding Web 2.0 infrastructures presents certain cultural claims about media, identity, and technology. It suggests that everyone can and should use new Internet technologies to organize and share information, to interact within communities, and to express oneself. It promises to empower creativity, to democratize media production, and to celebrate the individual while also relishing the power of collaboration and social networks.

But Web 2.0 also embodies a set of unintended consequences, including the increased flow of personal information across networks, the diffusion of one’s identity across fractured spaces, the emergence of powerful tools for peer surveillance, the exploitation of free labor for commercial gain, and the fear of increased corporatization of online social and collaborative spaces and outputs.

Sin embargo, pese a las críticas, muchas de ellas muy acertadas, David Silver, en History, Hype, and Hope: An Afterward termina con una visión esperanzada, que los educadores deberíamos tener en cuenta:

This is the writeable generation, a generation of young people who think of media as something they read and something they write – often simultaneously. This is a generation of content creators, a generation of young people who with the help of Web 2.0 tools know how to create content, how to share content, and how to converse about content. This is the generation for whom broadcast media – and its silent, obedient audiences – is rapidly fading and for whom conversations make more sense than lectures. This is a new generation with new writeable behaviors and it’s hard not to be hopeful about that.