twopointouch

You know we’re in trouble when people start comparing the Web 2.0 trend to postmodernism. In my general experience, it’s a sure sign that the conversation is about to disappear up its own backside. However, praise is due to Dr Paddy Byers who very cleverly teased out some of the links in a piece he wrote last week.

Generally speaking, postmodernists deny the validity of claims to objectivity, the power of reason and what they call grand narratives. Grand Narratives are the stories we use to structure our lives. We also find the idea that the media creates our reality, that there’s no originality left, only copies of what there’s been before.

It’s a little bit flippant, but if that isn’t a description of much of the blogosphere, I don’t know what is. The idea that each of us can become a publisher. That every individual blogger’s thoughts have equal weight and validity. “We, the media”. And some postmodern ideas also seem an apt description of the continual annotation and comment on each other’s ideas - like this post. You might also think about things like digg and RSS - where the reader is also editor.

More seriously, Dr Byers notes that some parts of what we call Web 2.0 are better described as belonging to an alternative and very different ideology, collectivism. Collectivists can potentially believe lots of things, but we’re talking about the idea of an “emphasis on collective rather than individual action or identity” (Merriam Webster). This would cover things like social bookmarking, networks and projects that depend on collective intelligence - be that a collection of people, machines or databases.

There’s a handy list:

Harnessing collective intelligence: collectivism
Data is the next Intel inside: collectivism
Meeting the needs of the long tail: postmodernism
Postcasting, narrowcasting: postmodernism
The perpetual beta: (arguably) postmodernism

Why does any of this matter? Who cares if it’s postmodern or not? In many ways it doesn’t matter. People will keep trying things - some will stick and some won’t. It only matters when we try to ask “what would be the web 2.0 approach to X?” Because it’s formed from two competing ideologies, you might end up with two very different, equally valid, answers. But that still doesn’t matter, you might say. Try them both and see which one works. That would be the postmodern answer, I guess. If you were a collectivist, we’d probably have a vote.