First Monday: Volume 13, Number 3 :: Preface: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 by Michael Zimmer; Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0Web 2.0: An argument against convergence by Trebor Scholz; by Matthew Allen; Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0 by Kylie Jarrett; Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation by Søren Mørk Petersen; The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0 by Michael Zimmer; Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance by Anders Albrechtslund; History, Hype, and Hope: An Afterward by David Silver.

“Web 2.0 represents a blurring of the boundaries between Web users and producers, consumption and participation, authority and amateurism, play and work, data and the network, reality and virtuality. The rhetoric surrounding Web 2.0 infrastructures presents certain cultural claims about media, identity, and technology. It suggests that everyone can and should use new Internet technologies to organize and share information, to interact within communities, and to express oneself. It promises to empower creativity, to democratize media production, and to celebrate the individual while also relishing the power of collaboration and social networks.

But Web 2.0 also embodies a set of unintended consequences, including the increased flow of personal information across networks, the diffusion of one’s identity across fractured spaces, the emergence of powerful tools for peer surveillance, the exploitation of free labor for commercial gain, and the fear of increased corporatization of online social and collaborative spaces and outputs…” From the Preface by Michael Zimmer.