ONLY a few years ago, "Web 2.0" – a term now as quaint as the "information superhighway" – was considered revolutionary. Rather than relying on the lumbering dinosaurs of big media to get news and entertainment, people could film their own videos and voice their opinions directly via Twitter and YouTube. Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and the Arab Spring showed that people could use social media to organise, mobilise and democratise. Emerging technologies promised a liberating future.
In 2008, I moved to San Francisco to conduct ethnographic research on the group of people who, at the time, used social media more than anyone else in the US – workers in Web 2.0 start-ups. I wanted to examine what the people at the leading edge of the country's social media technologies were actually doing with these tools, to discover what the behaviour of these early adopters might herald for the ...
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