Image from Alfresco The Web 2.0 started as a new internet era where direct interaction between users is the most important part: no more static contents. The best example of how things changed can be found on the blogs. Blogs offered to their visitor the opportunity of participate through leaving comments and opinions of the articles posted there. Then social networks appeared: platforms that offered even more possibilities. Dana Boyd and Nicole Ellison offer us a definition of that:
We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. (1)
Examples of social networks are Facebook, Youtube and Myspace, platforms where the users have account and they are allowed to share information after the sign up. When they sign up they are also becoming a part of a particular virtual community. Facebook and Youtube have less than six years online and they control most of the social interaction on the web
Is not complicated to find a link because social networks, blogs and intellectual-literary work. Both consider creation, discussion and generations of ideas as very important elements. Adam Penenberg show that this just what happens on the web: “users, enthusiastically disseminate ideas, information, opinión, links to blogs, potos, videos, and Web services” (13). That means that the web is a proper context to offer similar real discussion spaces.
Those virtual networks are based in info-generation and they need constantly interaction. Penenberg´s proposal points out that the way how social networks and Web 2.0 work is through what he calls ‘viral loops’, a kind of rhizomatic reading where we are nothing if where not linked by somebody else. He makes a really easy question: pregunta es muy sencilla: “What sense of being on Facebook if none of your friends are?” (13). However, this ‘rhizomatic Reading is an illusion: we are immersed inside the universe of a portal (Facebook, Sónico, etc) and we cannot do anything against it. We depend on a platform. So, when institutions and agents want to participate in the social networks universe they need to convince people (users) to follow and interact with them. Is not just to ‘join the community, they have to construct attractive contents.
Not considering this Webspace 2.0 would be dangerous. 2/3 of internet participants use social networks[i]. We have to consider that just only Facebook has more than 300 million active users[ii] and about a billion o the videos are reproduced daily on Youtube. If Facebook were a country, it would the fourth biggest behind China, India an the United States. Just in the US, at least one third of the internet users update weekly their ‘status’ in a social network. With that information, how literature can avoid this ‘space’?
Is not only about to look for new mechanisms. Internet, allows to expose new agents and all we need is a computer. Thus, is possible to have more mediators, opening the possibility of descentralize traditional nodes of enunciation. Laddaga knows that and that’s why he promotes new ways of interaction in different art disciplines, where also collective work is sometimes even more important than the final work. With Youtube and Blospot was possible to have new ‘celebrities’ that we might probably wouldn’t know just with traditional media.
In some literary circuits there is still some prejudges about new technologies, while in other arts disciplines is more disseminated. How new technologies are manifested in literary practices, especially in creation? When Agustin Fernández Mallo writes about poetry, he shows that this genre is ankylosed if we compared with the plastic arts; “Quiza por primera vez en la Historia…se da el caso de que un movimiento artístico no tenga su correlato en la poesía. El poeta se ha quedado atrás” (26). And, not just the poets, but also the critics that is just beginning to learn how to adapt himself to the new technologies.
Taking a look at Facebook, could we call this platform an aesthetic product , and could be compare it with an academic debate of with a literary work? I looks like for now no, but its importance as a tool for dialogue is growing every day. Considering a question that Alejandro Piscitelli makes about another discipline: : “¿Puede hacerse filosofía usando el hipertexto?” (32), and the answer is ‘Yes’, as well as we could make it with the regular text.
In the United States, country where most of the internet companies are based, we can track how the Web 2.0 is not just a ‘curious’ tool but also has played and important role in society, like in the 2008 presidential elections ,when Barack Obama hired one of the Facebook founders to promote his campaign with young people. Also, since his term in the government started, the White House (and many other Government Agencies) launched a Twitter Account and a Blog. Is a new way to capitalize the anxiety of virtual users, letting them express with those tools.
As the same way that it happens in the first-world countries, is it possible that virtual media may become so important in Latin American? While not to many people have internet access in their houses, (compared with the 80 percent in the US), in countries like Peru the phenomenon of ‘cabinas de internet’ (cybercafés) spread in many cities, allows internet access to many people with a reasonable price. Thus, is not a mere coincidence that Peru is world- ranked 34 in the use of social networks[iii].
Peruvian Internet phenomenon are usually famous in the musical field, with ‘outsiders’ singers like La Tigresa del Oriente[iv] and La Pequeña Wendy Sulca[v] (who bécame famous on TV afther their uploaded videos on Youtube) and also some film projects like ‘12 Pack’ (a movie about peruvian surfers) that had the premiere on Facebook.
The fact that most of the internet phenomenon in Peru are related with entertainment doesn´t mean that are the only ones. In the cultural and literary area they probably don’t get millions of visits, but thousand of user participate and get involved in a social network and blog to produce literary work.
[ii] Información Oficial de Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
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