Come On In. The Water's Fine.
An Exploration of Web 2.0 Technology and its Emerging Impact on Foundation Communications

Produced for the Communications Network
Made possible by support from The California Endowment, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

The Internet has become not only a new medium for consuming information, but also a platform upon which every user has the power to produce content as well. The defining features of what has come to be called “Web 2.0” activities and applications are that they are interactive and networked: users participate by contributing content, or controlling it in some way, and sharing it within their networks of others interested in the same topics. Users can control the information as never before by customizing what they receive, how or where they view the content, and when they respond. In some cases, they aggregate, re- package, and redistribute content among their networks.

A broad set of tools and technologies has emerged which allow for this kind of interactive, networked conversation. The technologies and formats we focused on in our research include: blogging, online forums, podcasts and videos, interactive annual reports or research reports, wikis, social bookmarking, social networking, virtual reality sites, text messaging, RSS feeds and online searchable databases.

Rather than referring to a specific application or technology, Web 2.0 has been called a philosophy for how to use Internet-based tools and applications. Charles M. Firestone of the Aspen Institute describes it primarily as a change “from ‘push’ technologies to the ‘pull’ approach . .. .in essence a reversal in the flow of communications from the center out to the user up.” Individuals “pull” the information they are most interested in, sometimes by researching and writing it themselves, at other times by aggregating or repackaging content from a variety of sources and, increasingly, by finding a network of others interested in the same topic and sharing content among themselves. In this Web 2.0 environment—where user control is king—it is increasingly difficult to “push” a single message to a single captive audience.

Benefits of Web 2.0 are emerging. In his seminal 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, author James Suroweicki argued that aggregated individual information and opinions often result in better decisions than those made by individuals alone or “unwise crowds” and mobs prone to “group think.” Some—including a growing number of foundations—are experimenting with Web 2.0 technologies as tools for tapping this collective wisdom.

For example, in a 2007 report for the Aspen Institute, The Rise of Collective Intelligence, David Bollier describes some early experiments, including the example of Gary Kasparov vs. The World in 1999, a chess match in which more than 50,000 people around the world voted via the Internet on “The World’s” next moves. (Kasparov won after 62 moves.) Bollier also describes an experiment by a minor league baseball team. For the second half of the 2006 season the Schaumberg (Illinois) Flyers managed the team through fan voting on the Internet. (Their first half record was 31-17; they went 15-33 in the second half.) Perhaps more successfully, a 2005 study published in Nature concluded that Wikipedia “comes close” to the Encyclopedia Britannica in accuracy on scientific topics. In each case, we see evidence of new collaborative environments—networked, social, scaled—that have the potential to change behavior, and outcomes, in profound and unexpected ways.

Mass media in particular have seen dramatic changes as a result. Web 2.0 technologies influence how consumers of conventional media (print or broadcast) learn about the world. Producers, editors and other members of the mainstream press routinely monitor the blogosphere for breaking news, rumors and reports, trends and story ideas. What’s more, approximately 12 million Americans maintain a blog, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, and a growing number of them consider themselves to be citizen journalists. Aided by the portability of laptops, the proliferation of wireless technology, the simplicity of digital media (from camera phones to movie-making software) and the immediate gratification that comes with making content available to hundreds of millions of readers worldwide, this citizen army now competes with the Fourth Estate in ways no one could have imagined even five years ago.