Swarm Forms: On Platforms and Creativity. ByOlga Guriunova.
Will the ‘hive mind’ of social networking replace classical forms of knowledge production? Comparing Web 2.0 and small-scale, self-run cultural platforms, Olga Goriunova maintains the possibility for originality in both contexts, while identifying how the same old commercial and institutional pressures still operate.
The term ‘platform’ is so common today it makes people sick (though not as much as ‘Web 2.0’ does). It is thought to have originated with Tim O’Reilly and his article on Web 2.0 in which he describes ‘the web as platform’, not as a figure of speech but a description of concrete developments. [1] Back in 2002, when I started conceiving of my work on the software art repository Runme.org in terms of a platform on which to build an art trend, it was difficult to decide on which term to apply. ‘Platform’ only had a history of metaphorical usage, such as with the Dutch ‘Virtueel Platform’ which was established in 1998 as an expertise centre ‘stimulating innovation and supporting e-culture’.[2]
It seems that the web as ‘platform’ in O’Reilly’s terms bears a mainly technical meaning. A platform spans ‘all connected devices’, ‘delivering software as a continually-updated service’; ‘a platform for interacting with content’.[3] Even ‘the web and all its connected devices as one global platform’ implies the meaning of a platform as of a server (or servers) ‘delivering desktop-like applications over the web’.[4] Thus, a platform for Web 2.0 adepts serves applications to end-users through a web browser allowing interaction with content. Such a definition is useful and helps make a distinction for designers and programmers between Web 1.0 that supposedly was about static html-based web sites (with CGI or Perl on the back-end) and Web 2.0’s dynamic platforms generally built with ‘CSS for layout, XML for data, XHTML for markup, JavaScript and the DOM for behavior…’ on the front end and ‘PHP or (especially) Ruby on Rails’ on the back-end.[5]
However, this description does not adequately address the politics of the technical architectures and applications involved. O’Reilly and his followers try to do this by nodding towards the fostering of community, collaboration, the ‘architecture of participation’, ‘rich-user experiences’, and ‘collective intelligence’, but continuously fail to prove that such cultural phenomena were not present in the times of what they term Web 1.0. My criticism is not original; Slate.com has been calling Web 2.0 a technical upgrade, while the participatory or social aspects of Web 2.0 are ‘what the Web was supposed to be all along’, as Tim Berners-Lee puts it.[6]
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