In recent years, along with increased talk of Web 2.0, there’s been talk of the “We Generation.” What does this mean? And is it a fair label?

First, a quick review. We’ve heard various appellations for recent generations: Generation X, Generation Y, the Millennials, Echo Boomers, Generation Z, Generation C. You can’t really get a straight answer on what’s what, but most sources I’ve looked at say that Generation X follows the Baby Boomers and includes those born between 1965 and 1981. It’s actually 1980, but everyone says give or take a few years, so I did (just to get my wife, born in ’81, in my generation). Us Generation Xers are relatively small (48 million in the US); Gen Y, which follows us and which we’ll say is from 1982 (exactly) to 1995 (give or take five years), numbers about 71 million. They’re sometimes called the Millennials, too. But when they end and the next generation starts is a little up-for-grabs.

It’s also a little up-for-grabs what to call this most recent generation. Some have, quite unimaginatively, dubbed them Generation Z, and there are plenty of other names floating around, but many of them center around the idea that these kids (born circa 1995, we’ll say — just to keep it simple) are products of the Digital Age. Hence names like “The Google Generation.”

My current high school students are straddling the fence between Generation Y and The Next One. They have had cell phones around their entire life; same with the internet and email; they’ve never had a rotary phone; the Soviet Union has never existed in their lifetime; they have only known two presidents; the Berlin wall hasn’t existed. The list goes on.

But in terms of media use, I’m seeing some very different trends in my current batch of students from those who were in high school a mere five years ago. Consider that YouTube was created in February of 2005. The blogging craze took off in 2004. The very first iPods came out in 2001. Google became a publicly traded company in 2004. MySpace was founded in 2003; Facebook was founded in 2004. Web 2.0 was labeled as such in 2005. Wikipedia was launched in 2001. The first commercial camera-phone in the U.S. was available in 2002.
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I just finished a book called The Brief History of the Dead. The first chapter of it was originally a short story published in The New Yorker, and you can see it by clicking these blue words. In the novel, there’s a character who tries to figure out how many people he knew in his life. He tallies 42,000, though he eventually comes to believe that the number must be more than that, perhaps closer to 50,000 or even reaching as much as 70,000.

I haven’t tried this myself, but I suspect it would be quite difficult to tally everyone I’ve known. And in many cases, the distinctions would be a little blurry. I certainly know the students I’ve taught and the parents I’ve conferenced with. I know the clerks at the grocery store, even if I can’t tell you their names. I know hundreds of colleagues and neighbors and teammates from over the years. But do I know the flight attendant who served me orange juice on my cross-Atlantic flight to Brussels in 1998? Do I know all the telemarketers who called my residence before I got on the national no-call list?

Surely, I can’t remember all the names of everyone I’ve met. And if I peruse my grading books from years past, I might chance upon a student whose name sounds familiar, but whose face I can’t recall. But when we bring various media into the mix, the gradations of knowing get more complicated. If my only contact with someone has been over the phone (the stubborn AOL customer service rep who wouldn’t let me cancel my account comes to mind), do I know him? What about instant messaging? I don’t chat with strangers, but in recent years, I have been known to opt for chat tech support over phone tech support. Last year, a rep from Linksys helped me get my wireless router up and running after it mysteriously crapped out. She had some plain Jane name — like Jane or something — but I’m pretty sure that a lot of those tech support people, especially the ones based in India, take on a more American-sounding name. So I likely never knew her name.

But there are plenty of people on the internet whose real names are withheld for some reason or another. I’ve interacted with people in forums (again for tech support; forums are great for when your warranty is up and the company who made your failing device will no longer help you), but they have names like MicJagger and lordvader129. And I’ve actually spoken to people over xbox live who have names like Mr. FuzzyNickel (I called him Fuzzy for short).

And then there are “friends” lists. Though it may be difficult to identify who I know, it should be easy to label a friend, no?

Web 2.0 loves social networking. Facebook and Myspace are the most popular ones here in the States, but there are several others (shown on this map of the world based on their popularity), and there are, of course, other methods of becoming acquainted with someone. You can follow people on tumblr and twitter; you can “add as a contact” on flickr; you can become allies or rivals on pmog; you can join all sorts of hobby-based “communities” where you interact with others (poets.com is one); and of course, there are all sorts of internet dating sites (I know of at least two very compatible married couples who met over the internet, so it must work in some instances). The list goes on.

But for those of us who haven’t used the internet much for social purposes, the whole concept of friendship in cyberspace is really strange. Let me tell you about six fictional people who have (not actually) requested to be my friends on Facebook.
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To begin with, what is Web 2.0? As I said before, I’m almost three years late in answering this question. It was pretty thoroughly answered by a guy named Tim O’Reilly who wrote an essay called – wait for it – “What is Web 2.0?” but since it’s a long article and Google is making us all stupider, I’ll go over the highlights.

As I understand it, Web 2.0 is essentially about two things: 1) the collective, and 2) data management.

First, the collective.

As O’Reilly states in his article, “hyperlinking is the foundation of the web.” When you add a new site to the web, it becomes bound to the whole net by people linking to and from it. This linking happens naturally and organically as people navigate through links. Of course, hyperlinking isn’t new. But what we’ve come to learn after a decade of widespread internet use is that the link structure gives us the best indication of the best content. Google, which is one of the most prominent harbingers of the Web 2.0 revolution, utilizes the “link structure” of the web to return results. That is, Google has programs that can read page “importance” through its PageRank technology.

Other sites have followed suit. Digg allows people to read articles that others have “dugg” or deemed worth reading. Sites like del.icio.us do the same with bookmarking web pages and articles. Various image bookmarking sites (like FFFFound and we heart it) operate along the same philosophy, which is that other users of the web can indeed tell you what’s worth investigating.

And that’s the core philosophy of Web 2.0: to rely on the collective, to trust the mob of people out there. Use their linking and navigation and knowledge to deliver better content.

Wikipedia has been the most blatant experiment in mob trust with its anyone-can-edit-it approach, but they’re not the only ones. Amazon also uses mob trust quite a bit. They allow their customers to post reviews of books (and other products), and they also provide “personalized recommendations” and that “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section.

Further down their pages, you can also find a section labeled, “Suggested Tags for Similar Products.” Tags are very Web 2.0 as well. And O’Reilly points to Flickr as the exemplar of tagging and “folksonomy.” Folksonomy, as opposed to taxonomy, is a method of categorization that relies on – guess who? “” the users.

The message here is one of decentralization. Let the people organize things. Let them add new information. Hell, let them even develop and modify the products and services offered. This approach stands in contrast to the approach of the 90s, which was about “publishing, not participation . . . advertisers, not consumers.” But nowadays, it’s the “collective power of small sites” that really determines the web’s content.

A case in point: We Feel Fine. Read More →

Well, each summer, I seem to stumble into a project. Last summer, it was that documentary on Race and Humor; this summer, it’s about Web 2.0. I’m a couple years too late in documenting thoughts and theories about Web 2.0, but I’m gonna do it anyway since Web 2.0 services recently seem to be choose-your-own-cliched-metaphor (skyrocketing, getting out of hand, growing to new heights, multiplying, proliferating).

Earlier this year, I joined Facebook. I did it because it makes finding people easy (in this case I was looking for current and former students of the high school where I teach); I was putting together a tribute website for a couple of retiring teachers, which I did via Ning, and I wanted to get a hold of students and alums who might have had some positive words for the retirees. I tracked the website’s traffic using Google Analytics, which allowed me to see how many people were going to the Ning site everyday and where they were coming from. I even made a vlog and posted some pictures and videos, which I might have done using my Flickr or Vimeo or YouTube accounts if the Ning site hadn’t allowed direct uploads of pictures and videos also.

It’s not that the Ning project was my induction into Web 2.0 services; it’s just that it got me a little more immersed into it. I was already wading into the water; the Ning thing simply required me to dunk my head. And it turned out to be an interesting experiment in the web’s interconnectedness. I’d email the few people who had already registered on the tribute site, imploring them to spread the word; I might tell them about the vlog I had posted, or the new pictures that were up. The next day, though I may only have gotten one or two new registrants, I could see through Google Analytics that the site had gotten 50 hits. Meanwhile, on my Facebook account, I was getting friend requests left and right from students. Students! Most students don’t want teachers to be able to look into their social lives with such clarity; and to tell the truth, I don’t want to look into my students social lives with such clarity (that’s why I never — NEVER — chaperone a dance). But once we were friends (I made it my policy to accept all friend requests), I could navigate to their profile pages and essentially eavesdrop on their wall-posted conversations with other students. (Could!) Once, while updating my Facebook page with a picture of me next to some cow’s asses, I even got a pop-up window from a student wanting to chat.

In short, the Facebook thing, though potentially disturbing, was doing exactly what I wanted it to do. It was helping to attract attention so I could spread the word about the retirement tribute. Such is the power of the web’s interconnectedness.

But it gets better.
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