Publish at August 18 2010 Updated April 21 2026
If you didn't have time to take the podcast of France Culture's " Place de la toile " program on July 3 with you, there's still time tolisten to itonline. Philippe Bouquillion and Jacob Thomas Matthews, guests on this program on the collaborative web, are researchers in information and communication sciences in France. The book they present, " Le web collaboratif " (The Collaborative Web ), far from joining the cohort of fashionable publications on the subject, analyzes the mutations of the culture and communication industries on the basis of surveys of network and Web 2.0 players from a critical and rather unconsensual perspective.
In the eyes of managers and stakeholders in this new participative culture, particularly in the U.S., the network is seen as the advent of a new being and a better society.
Perhaps this is why Tim O'Reilly - publishing magnate, conference organizer and respected visionary - has said that it's time to rethink our certainties about personal information and its use, and why the CEOs of Google and Facebook have made statements along similar lines.
These beliefs, shared by a growing number of individuals, are based on the certainty that new forms of organization will emerge spontaneously, and that the regulations previously provided by states and institutions (schools, cultural content industries) will give way to a kind of market where the availability of information will naturally create exchanges.
The question is whether these exchanges will create (or are already creating) economic, cultural and social value, which can be converted into income - but for whom?
Philippe Bouquillion and Jacob Thomas Matthews' analysis reveals the driving forces behind a veritable economic battle for control of users between the communication industry (the web) and the content industry (cultural industries). They show, for example, that the birth of Web 2.0 followed the bursting of the speculative bubble in 2003, and represents an attempt to restore the image of the web and its companies in the eyes of investors and banks (an attempt whose economic viability has yet to be proven), rather than a fundamental cultural and social movement.
They attack the myth of "user-assisted" production and creation, and highlight the profound contradiction in discourse: while forcefully denying their market dimension, the communications industries need it to be credible to financiers.
According to the OECD, 5 main sources of revenue characterize the collaborative web field:
In addition, according to the authors, there would be new revenues for the various "intermediation" players, who would work as brokers: copy and broadcast rights obtained from user-generated content, and of course, data collection, notably user profiles.
On this last point, it is one of the book's weaknesses not to develop this aspect, which may not have been so important at the time of the surveys and studies carried out, but which is likely to cause controversy in the 2010-2011 academic year.
More serious seems to be the danger posed to the freedom of researchers in the humanities and social sciences, who would be unwilling to show enthusiasm for this drive towards collaborative culture. Any critical discourse would be counter-productive and tantamount to resentment of the new spirit of capitalism, inspired by tired old institutions or outmoded content industrialists.
"There is a discourse held by many researchers that makes the connection between putting the user at the center and a surplus of democracy".
The pressure is on, they claim, for researchers to spend less time on theory and more time on concrete action to "change the world" and move "in the direction of history".
There is a worrying aspect to this conception of the researcher as "passer-by" and "believer", and it is in scientific hindsight that the salutary work of Philippe Bouquillion and Jacob Thomas Matthews should be appreciated.
Many works on the collaborative web constitute "ideological vectors", truth-creating discourses closely associated with industrial or public projects. This is true in both directions: in idolatry as well as in denigration, and it is perhaps advisable to exercise the most elementary caution if you are a journalist, teacher, blogger or simply a citizen.
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