True enough. I just get all reactionary and put on my devil’s-advocate hat when I hear people using the word “revolution” way too much and ascribing all sorts of things to Web 2.0 that are as old as hypertext. Things *have* changed and evolved. In many ways it is better. I do love blogs, love WordPress, and even YouTube, but I am serious that these advances have also come with a significant loss. Call it “routinization of creativity,” but I think there is something about the internet that is so much more hum-drum than it was in the late ’90s. Here are some books that talk about subjects you just don’t hear about anymore:

Benedikt, Michael ed. Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge: MIT, 1991.
Johnson, Steven. Interface Culture. San Francisco: Harper, 1997.
Lévy, Pierre. Becoming Virtual. Trans. Robert Bononno New York: Plenum, 1998.
Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1993.
Rheingold, Howard. Virtual Reality. New York: Touchstone, 1991.
Sardar, Ziauddin and Ravetz, Jerome eds. Cyberfutures. London: Pluto, 1996.
Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen. New York: Touchstone, 1997.

Take a look at the descriptions of the topics they cover–they make our current batch of futurists sound boring. But I’m guilty of over simplification as well. Someone could write a whole book on how web philosophy has changed. It probably has to do with the dot com boom and bust as much as anything.

I find it hard to describe this concept of loss. I appreciate the ease of use as much as anyone. I appreciate that folks can now have their own sites whereas once they felt learning HTML was too much of a barrier. I appreciate that I will have ways to shield my young son from things I don’t want him seeing. In general, I appreciate the comfort of it. At the same time, there’s a problem with all of that. I can’t quite put my finger on it to give you an analogy.

I agree with Karine’s general point - something has changed. I don’t think the general concepts have changed too much. It’s the scale by which which those concepts are employed that has changed. And that has been driven by, IMHO, ease of use. Of course there were people making webpages in the mid ’90s and I’m sure that some of them were very comparable in many ways to the most popular webpages we visit today. Just as people were sharing mp3s before Napster. But it’s become so much easier that it’s becoming much more widespread.

I’m not sure that all of is really a revolution, though. Closer to evolution and maturation. Napster and the explosion it created in the music industry and the ever-growing aftershocks now challenging intellectual property as viewed by youths - *that* is a revolution. Blogs and user-generated content? Revolutionary in some contexts (e.g. mass media) but not in this context. It’s become much easier and perhaps we have reached a tipping point but the web has always been user generated from Berners Lee’s conception of HTML as a means of marking up and linking scientific documents at CERN to Mr. T Ate My Balls and onwards.

I think we can appreciate the evolution that has taken place without downplaying either the true revolutions that have taken place or the historical contributions of those who came before (and are still with us). Isn’t the fact that we’re transparently using software written by someone else hosted on a distant webserver administered by someone else to discuss a video created by someone we’ve never met encoded in a format that we don’t know evidence of significant evolution? We did all of this without even thinking, just typing some word into a little box and pressing “submit.” I don’t know if it’s a revolution but we’ve definitely come a long way, baby.

Morgan, don’t you think it’s a huge difference?

You’re right when you say this is a revolution. The playing field has been leveled to the point that anybody with an Internet access (don’t even need a computer anymore) can take part in the conversation.

As Web pros, we probably feel like mainframe programmers felt a few decades ago. Change is good though. The alternative would be kind of boring…