Web 2.0 and/as The Apocalypse: What The Terminator Has to Teach Us About Our Future

“We are living through the most momentous change in human communication in human history.”

Over the past couple of weeks, I have considered three of the four main responses Paul and I receive when we insist upon seeing the advent of Web 2.0 as a paradigm shift in human communication. So far, I've ruminated on: 1. We are not; 2. I can ignore it, so it can't be that big a deal; and 3. it's not a change at all, but a continuation of a process that dates back to Gutenberg, the codex, papyrus, the cave wall, the ribbiting frog. 

We've got one more to go:

• This isn’t a paradigm shift in human communication. This is the breaking of [choose any ordinal between the first and the seventh] seal of the apocalypse. 

How respond to fear? This is the defining question of the twenty-first century. (In the twentieth century, we were instructed that the only thing to fear was fear itself; now we are told, incessantly, that if we are not afraid at all times, then we are not true patriots.)

The list of what we should fear is a daunting one, to be sure: the Global War on Terror; global economic collapse; global environmental devastation; a future that will be hot, flat, and crowded; The End Times; The advent of Web 2.0.

That last entry does seem just a bit out of place on a list of the preoccupying fears of our time.

Continued at http://www.richardemiller.com/2010/11/web-20-andas-apocalypse.html