Web 2.0: before, during and after the event
An issue of the Fibreculture Journal critically exploring the
ontogenesis of Web 2.0

Issue Editors: Anna Munster and Andrew Murphie
Completed papers submitted by October 31, 2008
Publication date: May 1, 2009

Issue Focus:

In 2005 Tim O'Reilly famously used the phrase 'an attitude, not a
technology' to describe the burgeoning experience of Web 2.0. After 3
or 4 years, the hype surrounding associated notions of user-generated
content, the 'wisdom of crowds', 'the long tail' and social networking
both continues and fades. Practices such as collaborative tagging and
micro-blogging have become everyday online gestures, while YouTube,
Facebook and Bebo comfortably colonise the network horizon as default
interfaces. 'Objects', 'subjects' and 'content' are dissappearing on a
massive scale – far larger and faster than in their much-touted
postmodern demise – and 'environments', 'context' and 'worlds' become
the key modes of online generation and production. This suggests that
Web 2.0 may be more akin to a topology rather than attitude or
technology – one which launches us in(to) the middle of things. If Web
2.0's cartography is topological (repeated production of selfsame
space via variation), then its temporality might best be understood
through considerations of 'the event'. As Maurizzio Lazzarato has
suggested, everyday actions - going to bed, turning on the television,
logging on – comprise our contemporary habitual corporeal events, but
these are simultaneously and only the punctuation of the more
continuous event of informatic flows. If Web 2.0 is an 'event' that
somehow semiotically launched itself around 2004-5, its temporality
has now become that of an 'always'.

In this issue of the fibreculture journal, however, we invite
contributions that critically and creatively rethink the event of Web
2.0. To adlib with Lazzarato, and following Deleuze and Guattari's
articulation of the virtualities of events, another possible
world/'web' is always there, in potential. Hence Web 2.0 is not simply
what it is - attitude, technology or topology - but is still under
production, in active ontogenesis and therefore up for grabs. We ask
authors to address the actual and potential existence of genealogies,
incompatabilities and new modes of making and thinking Web 2.0. For
example, should the historical relations between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0
be thought in terms of radical break? Or can we – as Olia Lialina has
suggested in her consideration of the recouped aesthetics of old
homepages by the templates of MySpace – see Web 2.0 as a freezing of
earlier more dynamic flows? What lies outside of Facebook, indeed
beyond the additive logic of 'friends'? And after we break up with our
'friends', what other circuits might emerge? A number of key theorists
such as Terranova, Lovink and Rossiter, Galloway and Thacker have
begun to address the presence of incompatabilities, counterprotocols
and conflict as constitutive of the network. We are seeking papers
that take these and new concepts that biurficate the 'always' into
rethinking the topology of Web 2.0.

Specific Topics for address include:

-ontogenetic approaches to network events
-creative genealogies of Web 2.0
-investigations of 'subnetworks' and alternatives to standardised
templates and interfaces
-investigations of confictual and differential implementations of:
search, APIs, social networking, micro-blogging, collaborative
tagging,vlogging etc
-critical analyses of the relations between social movements and Web
2.0 (note: no simple empirical studies of a social movement's use of
Web 2.0 services or technologies)
-aesthetic analyses and transformations of Web 2.0
-Web 3.0 as ontogenetic event, topological shift or the "network to come".

Articles must be submitted in full fibreculture journal house style.
You must first read the Guidelines for Submission at
http://journal.fibreculture.org/polstyle.html#submit. You can access
information about house style at
http://journal.fibreculture.org/polstyle.html#style. Please note,
submissions not in house style will automatically be returned to
authors for formatting. You will not be able to have your paper
considered for publication unless you have formatted it correctly.
The journal is peer reviewed and authors are expected to take readers
reports into consideration when finalising their articles for
publication. Negotiation with the editors over potential changes is
usual practice.

Please submit articles no later than October 31, 2008 to either Anna
Munster, a-dot-munster-at-unsw-dot-edu-dot-au, or Andrew Murphie
a-dot-murphie-at-unsw-dot-edu-dot-au.
You must use the phrase 'Web 2.0 event issue' in your subject header.

--
"Take me to the operator, I want to ask some questions" - Barbara Morgenstern

"A traveller, who has lost his way, should not ask, Where am I? What
he really wants to know is, Where are the other places" - Alfred North
Whitehead

"I thought I had reached port; but I seemed to be cast back again into
the open sea" (Deleuze and Guattari, after Leibniz)

Andrew Murphie - Associate Professor
School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South
Wales, Sydney, Australia, 2052
Editor - The Fibreculture Journal http://journal.fibreculture.org/>
web:
http://www.andrewmurphie.org/
http://www.andrewmurphie.org/blog/
http://www.last.fm/user/andersand/
http://researchhub.cofa.unsw.edu.au/ccap/

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