Ho finalmente trovato il tempo di leggere l’articolo di David Beer e Roger Burrows (uno degli organizzatori del convegno di York) intitolato “Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: Some Initial Considerations”.
Ho preso nota di alcuni passi che mi sono sembrati particolarmente interessanti nello spazio tumblr.
Lo scopo dichiarato dell’articolo è quello di mettere in luce come il Web 2.0 sia un fenomeno sociologicamente interessante e al tempo stesso una sfida aperta per chi si occupa di studiare la società.
Il taglio dell’articolo è piuttosto descrittivo e tende ad aprire scenari più che a offire certezze.
In particolare Beer e Burrows identificano almeno tre fenomeni sociologicamente rilevanti in relazione al Web 2.0:
- I cambiamenti in corso nel rapporto fra consumo e produzione di contenuti;
- La pubblicazione di informazioni private in uno spazio pubblico;
- L’emergere di una nuova retorica della “democratizzazione”.
Interessante anche la parte finale nella quale gli autori provano a descrivere come il sociologo dovrebbe indagare questi fenomeni:
First, we need to be inside of the networks, online communities, and collaborative movements to be able to see what is going on and describe it. If we take Facebook for instance, it is not possible to enter into and observe the network without becoming a member, providing an institutional email, entering some personal details and generating a profile. Therefore, in order to get some idea of users and their practices it is necessary to become a ‘wikizen’. The social researcher will need to be immersed, they will need to be participatory, and they will need to ‘get inside’ and make some ‘friends’. We will have to become part of the collaborative cultures of Web 2.0, we will need to build our own profiles, make some flickering friendships, expose our own choices, preferences and views, and make ethical decisions about what we reveal and the information we filter out of these communities and into our findings. Our ability to carry out virtual ethnographies will – by necessity – involve moving from the role of observer to that of participant observer.
(…)
A second issue is that once inside these networks we may explore the possibilities of using Web 2.0 applications, and particularly the interactive potentials of SNS, as research tools or research technologies (this is not necessarily limited to research into Web 2.0, SNS could be used to conduct research on any topic).
(…)
There are possibilities then for tailoring innovative research strategies that take advantage of the interactive potentials of these new media and of the data that they hold. But can we, should we, use it to study itself?
(…)
As sociologists what we may need to do is take a leaf out of the ‘wikizens’ book and adapt to the possibilities of research from within the information flows. Mimicking, in a sense, the desire of wikizens to find out about each other and the connections people make by browsing through SNS. ‘Wikizens’ are already engaged in sociological research of sorts. SNS in particular reveal a sociological tendency in web users as they search and browse through profiles of their fellow ‘wikizens’, reading about them, looking at photographs and so on.
(…)
We may, for instance, begin to place Web 2.0 into broader contexts of celebrity culture – the celebration of the mundane, reality TV, celebrity reality TV, gossip magazines, and the ‘voting out’ cultures of X-factor and any other number of programmes. It is certain that one significant difference between the citizen and the ‘wikizen’ is the value that they place on privacy.
(…)
In terms of conceptualising this change it would seem that Urry’s (2003) recent call for new concepts that better capture the contemporary complexity turn is entirely fitting.
Bellissimo infine l’esempio dell’abusatissimo concetto di flâneur.
On the later we can imagine reworkings of the concept of the flâneur for instance. Here we can visualise the ‘wikizen’ as flâneur, wandering without direction around wikis, folksonomies, mashups and SNS, taking in the surroundings without concern for a final destination. Indeed, recently the flâneur has been re-energised as a concept for understanding the experiences of virtual space – the ‘virtual flâneur’ (Featherstone, 1998), the ‘cyborg’ flâneur (Shields, 2006), and the ‘flâneur electronique’ (Atkinson & Willis, 2007). The problem is that unlike the flâneur wandering around the Paris arcades as described in Benjamin’s 1930s Arcades Project (1999), or even the more recent reworkings of the flâneur wandering around virtual space, the wikizen is instead involved in generating and shaping the environments that they wander through and observe.
Una differenza non da poco tanto che qualche riga dopo gli autori aggiungono…
The point here is that in light of Web 2.0 it is necessary to reconsider how we conceptualise what is happening. The first step may well be to construct more complete and differentiated descriptions of what is happening in Web 2.0, who is involved, and the practices entailed, in order to inform and enrich new concepts or reworkings of our theoretical staples. It is here that a movement toward a more descriptive sociology may fit.
Condivido l’analisi.
Penso solo che questo nuovo e più ricco apparato concettuale esista già.
Si chiama cibernetica di secondo ordine e qualcuno ci ha anche fatto la gentilezza di adattarlo già allo studio della società.
Technorati tags: sociologia, web 2.0, york, lab20, David Beer, Roger Burrows
