Web 2.0: An Open and Shut Debate

Web 2.0 would seem to represent an emancipatory move from the old closed or bounded system of technologies, forms, and institutions (the web page, the encyclopedia, the firm, the university) to a more democratic open one (the wiki, wikipedia, wikinomics, open content). A glance at the past suggests, however, that such struggles are not entirely new, not, as some would have it, entirely the function of new technologies, nor entirely linear. By looking at earlier struggles over open or closed, we can not only understand the current trajectory better, but also understand why it sometimes happens that technologies, forms, and institutions that were once triumphantly forced open in hard-fought battles nonetheless closed again.