Reflective Essay

Web 2.0 is a set of web design and development principles that first made an appearance in the early 2000s. These practices differ from the fixed communication of early web pages because Web 2.0 enables cooperation, interactivity, and user involvement. The growth of social media is a direct result of the impact of Web 2.0 technologies and practices, allowing people to interact digitally across time and distance. This technological and cultural shift from static web pages to community-driven, interactive sites has created new opportunities for participatory involvement by anyone with access to the internet.

Since the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies and practices, opportunities for community collaboration on the internet have exploded. With the ability for anyone, either named or anonymous, to participate in content generation across the web, Web 2.0 has introduced new, and perhaps unintended challenges in civil discourse. Although the intent of Web 2.0 was to engage and enable any common person to have a digital voice and a collaborative platform for self-expression, oftentimes these voices have contributed to further division along political, cultural and ideological lines. As more people become engaged in online communities, it has become a nearly impossible challenge for organizations to moderate the content that ultimately ends up on the platforms that they operate. Web 2.0 has fundamentally changed the way that people interact with the web and with each other.

On the positive side, Web 2.0 has allowed people amazing opportunities to stay connected with friends and loved ones across distances. For example, Facebook became available for public use in 2006. It began as a place to share photos, stories, videos and personal updates. People could follow and view the social profiles that they chose, and the Facebook feed was displayed in chronological order according to when content was posted. Just about everyone who joined Facebook in the early days would have been thrilled to have a platform that allows them to reconnect with old friends and stay connected through user-generated, multimedia content. Facebook’s growth exploded throughout the late 2000s as people longed to be a part of this emerging technology which helped them build digital social profiles and engage with people they knew, as well as making connections and building communities with new people who they may have never met in the physical world. In the early days of Twitter, people were encouraged to share what they were doing that day, there was a limit of 140 characters per tweet, and it was text only. In fact, the initial prompt of Twitter was actually “What are you doing today?”. As other social media platforms emerged, such as Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., the story was pretty much the same. Sharing content with people at a distance, getting connected, and staying connected.

During this time, Web 2.0 also impacted the publishing industry. No longer did one need to be a journalist working for a recognized media organization to be heard by millions. Blogging emerged with Web 2.0 and enabled citizen journalists, hobbyists, and average people to put their ideas and voices on the web. Web 2.0 brought about social engagement features such as commenting, likes, sharing, chat and other interactivity which caused a shift in the way that citizen publishers could engage with their audiences, and vice versa. New connections and networks were formed which would have otherwise not been possible in the era of static publications. The big, legacy media organizations have been slow to respond to the new Web 2.0 technologies, and their attention share has been impacted as people move to independent, more socially-interactive sources of news and content.

Despite all the positive developments emerging from the technologies and practices of Web 2.0, one could argue that the negative consequences of unbridled social interaction might outweigh the positives. In terms of civil discourse, user-generated social interactivity has provided a superhighway of political and ideological opinions, where the frequency of collisions continues to increase. The biggest cultural shift is that these technologies enable people to say things behind a keyboard that they would not otherwise say in a person-to-person interaction. The internet offers anonymity, and people have taken advantage of that anonymity to create division and controversial content. Many challenges have arisen due to the polarizing nature of discourse across digital media platforms. We will focus on three of these challenges: Corporate responsibility, mis-information / dis-information, and negative impacts to human relationships.

Corporate responsibility: With the emergence of Web 2.0, corporations have been faced with a new challenge of moderating content on their platforms. For example, anyone on Facebook can try to organize a violent rally or protest and attract thousands of interested participants. Facebook does not want to be in the business of allowing this type of violent or illegal behavior to propagate on its platform. Another challenge that platforms face is understanding how and when to moderate and censor unwanted speech such as hate speech or illegal content. The scale of user-generated content being created on these platforms is unmanageable, even for large moderation teams. Corporations have had to invest immense resources into designing algorithms and automated technologies to help moderate content, and they don’t always get it right. This leads to dissatisfaction among end-users who may believe their content was incorrectly targeted for censorship, as well as others who may perceive certain content as hateful or illegal. Corporations are also under legal scrutiny and possible financial exposure, since in many cases they can be held responsible for content posted on their platforms. The challenge of managing this major shift in public discourse is overwhelming and ongoing. People should have a sense of civic responsibility to engage in discussion and debate in a respectful manner, and this type of respectful discourse is easier to enforce in a public, face-to-face venue such as a town hall or an interview. However, managing and moderating civil discourse digitally at scale is proving to be a difficult, expensive, but necessary challenge that all publishers and platform owners are facing.

Mis-information / dis-information: Another major shift brought about by collaborative Web 2.0 practices is the flood of news and information that the average consumer is exposed to on the web. In times past, people had a small number of trusted news sources that they might consume. Today, with social media, blogs, chat, text messages, photos, videos, memes, and comments, the average consumer of digital content is bombarded with information overload everywhere they look. How can they know what is true and what is “fake news”? It takes time to research everything that you read on the internet, and most people are unable or unwilling to devote extra time to figure out the truth. An example of mis-information being distributed through interactive platforms is the QAnon phenomenon where an anonymous person or group was able to convince tens of thousands of people that children were being held captive inside of a Washington DC area pizza shop. The story became known as “Pizzagate” and triggered a potentially violent interaction from a citizen with a gun who stormed into the pizza shop to try to rescue the children, who weren’t there. This type of “fake news” phenomena is rampant throughout the web, touching every category of news and information including politics, business, economics, environment, health, education and more. These mis-information campaigns tend to spread very fast and wide, causing a shift in how consumers and platform owners must fact-check and minimize the spread of this often harmful information.

Human relationships: Perhaps the most individually impactful consequence of open discourse on the web is the negative impact that it has on personal relationships. Friendships and families have been torn apart because of the ease of argumentative discussions and wildly varying opinions on a myriad of social and political issues. Imagine the scenario where a couple of friendly business colleagues suddenly realize that they are on the opposite side of a political issue. They may find themselves trying to be professional and cordial in the workplace, but also spending countless hours after work arguing and debating things online. Families and friends have also experienced this kind of wedge in social relationships as an impact of Web 2.0 technologies, user-generated content and social media. This major shift in discourse was perhaps most apparent during the Covid pandemic in 2020 through today. Covid-related topics such as social isolation, masking, vaccines, business closures, and stay-at-home orders became polarizing issues for almost everyone.

Web 2.0 has ushered in a new era of how people communicate, for better and for worse. Conscientious digital citizenship is essential not only for writers and content contributors, but also for the everyday citizen who is engaging in a comment or discussion about a given article or topic. People may not realize that what they write behind their keyboard may have serious negative ripple effects in the form of hate speech, misinformation, legal consequences, and even shattered interpersonal relationships. As a civilized society, we need to be better educated not only on appropriate etiquette when engaging in the digital realm, but also on how to de-escalate, block or compartmentalize those who are set on creating conflict, pushing buttons, and perpetuating negative interactions. It is not just a moderation challenge for corporations and platform owners; we as digital citizens also need to learn better how to moderate the information coming to us through the explosion of digital channels that we will continue to see for years to come.