Web 2.0: before, during and after the event - An issue of the Fibreculture Journal critically exploring the ontogenesis of Web 2.0 :: Issue Editors: Anna Munster and Andrew Murphie :: Call for Papers - Deadline: October 31, 2008 :: Publication Date: May 1, 2009.

In 2005 Tim O’Reilly famously used the phrase ‘an attitude, not a technology’ to describe the burgeoning experience of Web 2.0. After 3 or 4 years, the hype surrounding associated notions of user-generated content, the ‘wisdom of crowds’, ‘the long tail’ and social networking both continues and fades. Practices such as collaborative tagging and micro-blogging have become everyday online gestures, while YouTube, Facebook and Bebo comfortably colonise the network horizon as default interfaces. ‘Objects’, ’subjects’ and ‘content’ are disappearing on a massive scale — far larger and faster than in their much-touted postmodern demise — and ‘environments’, ‘context’ and ‘worlds’ become the key modes of online generation and production. This suggests that Web 2.0 may be more akin to a topology rather than attitude or technology — one which launches us in(to) the middle of things. If Web 2.0’s cartography is topological (repeated production of selfsame space via variation), then its temporality might best be understood through considerations of ‘the event’. As Maurizzio Lazzarato has suggested, everyday actions - going to bed, turning on the television, logging on - comprise our contemporary habitual corporeal events, but these are simultaneously and only the punctuation of the more continuous event of informatic flows. If Web 2.0 is an ‘event’ that somehow semiotically launched itself around 2004-5, its temporality has now become that of an ‘always’.

In this issue of the Fibreculture Journal, however, we invite contributions that critically and creatively rethink the event of Web 2.0. To adlib with Lazzarato, and following Deleuze and Guattari’s articulation of the virtualities of events, another possible world / ‘web’ is always there, in potential. Hence Web 2.0 is not simply what it is - attitude, technology or topology - but is still under production, in active ontogenesis and therefore up for grabs. We ask authors to address the actual and potential existence of genealogies, incompatabilities and new modes of making and thinking Web 2.0. For example, should the historical relations between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 be thought in terms of radical break? Or can we - as Olia Lialina has suggested in her consideration of the recouped aesthetics of old homepages by the templates of MySpace - see Web 2.0 as a freezing of earlier more dynamic flows? What lies outside of Facebook, indeed beyond the additive logic of ‘friends’? And after we break up with our ‘friends’, what other circuits might emerge? A number of key theorists such as Terranova, Lovink and Rossiter, Galloway and Thacker have begun to address the presence of incompatibilities, counterprotocols and conflict as constitutive of the network. We are seeking papers that take these and new concepts that biurficate the ‘always’ into rethinking the topology of Web 2.0.

Specific Topics for address include:

-ontogenetic approaches to network events
-creative genealogies of Web 2.0
-investigations of ’subnetworks’ and alternatives to standardised templates and interfaces -investigations of conflictual and differential implementations of: search, APIs, social networking, micro-blogging, collaborative tagging,vlogging etc.
-critical analyses of the relations between social movements and Web 2.0 (note: no simple empirical studies of a social movement’s use of Web 2.0 services or technologies)
-aesthetic analyses and transformations of Web 2.0
-Web 3.0 as ontogenetic event, topological shift or the “network to come”.

Articles must be submitted in full Fibreculture Journal house style. You must first read the Guidelines for Submission here. Please note, submissions not in house style will automatically be returned to authors for formatting. You will not be able to have your paper considered for publication unless you have formatted it correctly.

The journal is peer reviewed and authors are expected to take readers reports into consideration when finalising their articles for publication. Negotiation with the editors over potential changes is usual practice.

Please submit articles no later than October 31, 2008 to either Anna Munster, a - dot - munster - at - unsw - dot - edu - dot - au, or Andrew Murphie a- dot -murphie -at -unsw -dot -edu -dot -au. You must use the phrase ‘Web 2.0 event issue’ in your subject header.