What was Web 2.0? Versions as the dominant mode of internet history

Abstract

This paper explores Web 2.0 as the marker of a discourse about the nature and purpose of the internet in the recent past. It focuses on how Web 2.0 introduced to our thinking about the internet a discourse of versions. Such a discourse enables the telling of a ‘history’ of the internet which involves a complex interweaving of past, present and future, as represented by the additional versions which the introduction of Web 2.0 enabled. The paper concludes that the discourse of versions embodied in Web 2.0 obscures as much as it reveals, and suggests a new project based on investigations of the everyday memories of the internet by which individual users create their own histories of online technology.