Introduction

This Introduction guides the reader through a critical and historiographic account of the cultural moment defined as Web 2.0. It outlines the main themes of the book as articulating serious questions around connectivity, ethics and recognition, and how connected social technologies have contributed to a transformed understanding of these aspects of human interaction. The Introduction then gives further details on the plan of work as covering these themes: outlining an ethics of Web 2.0 literacy; discussions around the psychosocial roles of agency in Web 2.0 cultures; and, in particular, the ‘locked-in’ discursive configurations of connectivity, as well as how the book develops an ethics of connectivity, which in turn leads to a critical theory of recognition. It then moves on to a contextual discussion of Web 2.0, its definitions and the ‘versioning’ aspects of Web discourse that characterise the predominant cultural approach to Web 2.0.