ABSTRACT
Technologies and pundits liberally applied the Web 2.0 label to wikis, blogs, social network sites, tagging, and user-generated content sites like Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, del.icio.us, Flickr, Digg, and Twitter. These technologies purportedly foretold freedom from traditional media sources, or "Big Media." Web 2.0 celebrated the adoption of social technologies as a precursor to a better, freer society, and framed the collection and sharing of information as the bedrock of revolution. Web 2.0 ideology is the child of both Silicon Valley entrepreneurial capitalism and activist subcultures like independent publishing, anti-globalization activism, Burning Man, cyberdelic rave culture, and free and open-source software. These countercultural movements can be hard to detangle. To unravel the complex assumptions within Web 2.0 ideology, it is necessary to understand its origins. The term began as a marketing ploy to differentiate a new crop of tech companies from their failed dot-com counterparts.
