The 'Cute Cat Theory' of the Internet
Karin writes:
Since we're thinking about digital literacies at the moment, I thought I would post this link to a great post on the 'Cute Cat Theory of the Internet' by Ethan Zuckerman. The starting point - that Web 1.0 was invented to help physicists share research papers, while Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats - is a succinct expression of some of the ideas about 'ludic literacies online' we have been talking about. He moves on to develop a more serious point about the way the 'cute cat' technologies are being used by global political activists - and the unintended consequences when governments try to block the activists' sites (you don't want to annoy the cute cat sharers too, then they might just notice they're living under a repressive regime!)
Well worth a look. Even if you don't like cute cats.
Since we're thinking about digital literacies at the moment, I thought I would post this link to a great post on the 'Cute Cat Theory of the Internet' by Ethan Zuckerman. The starting point - that Web 1.0 was invented to help physicists share research papers, while Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats - is a succinct expression of some of the ideas about 'ludic literacies online' we have been talking about. He moves on to develop a more serious point about the way the 'cute cat' technologies are being used by global political activists - and the unintended consequences when governments try to block the activists' sites (you don't want to annoy the cute cat sharers too, then they might just notice they're living under a repressive regime!)
Well worth a look. Even if you don't like cute cats.
posted by LRC at
08:00
2 Comments:
Karin, I thought the internet was invented so that people could see whether there was any coffee left in the Trojan room in Cambridge? (See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html) - and click the link for the 'up to date picture' to see what happened next!)
Well of course that's not quite right, I should say the 'World Wide Web' and even then the Trojan coffee room link predated that. However I do have some sympathy with Tim Reilly's doubts as to whether there ever was a 'Web 1.0' as distinct from Web 2.0 or maybe I'm a die-hard Bakhtinian. I suppose although the internet was dialogic from the first, it is now much easier for people to participate in a wider range of ways that in themselves have become technically easier. For example, one had to have some knowledge of html in the early days to write a web page, one needed a good connection to upload... the much easier technical situation today has made it much easier and quicker for people to participate.
By
Julia Gillen, At
14 March 2008 at 05:19
DB thinks: Hmmm, there’s more to it than that: there may be 3,097,120 mentions of ‘cat’ on flickr, but there are 3,300,071 mentions for ‘dog’. And results both animals are left behind by the 28,028,837 mentions of ‘me’. That’s what the web is about! :-)
By
LRC, At
19 March 2008 at 15:29
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