Is Web 2.0 a Cult?

The other day someone told me that I’d missed the train on the Web 2.0 social networking technology trend. I was taken aback. Me? Early Pine user in the late 1980s; using Lotus Notes to try to map every Citicorp employee and their reporting relationships in the early 90s (I never managed it); and me coding HTML in a text editor and brazenly using the three Unix commands I knew to push Web pages on and off the production server for Cisco Connection Online in 1996? Me not get something that’s all about the Web and communication and collaboration? Impossible.

But then I thought: Has it happened? Am I old? At 45 have I finally crossed that line to “you don’t get it?” My assertion which generated the missed-the-train comment was that there might be negative consequences for both organizations and individuals if they blindly adopt online social networking.

I also said that organizations ought to adopt policies to mitigate the risks associated with online social networking. To be fair, I did also say (and I think this was what really got them upset) that some organizations might not want to do social networking right now because the risk might outweigh the benefit. That last thing was apparently not quite right. I got smacked back with the “people have voted with their feet” and “the train has left the station.” I was challenged to find one negative thing about social networking. I was almost silenced.

Except when arguing with my son, I don’t think well on my feet. So, I wouldn’t have had much to say back anyway but I was also taken by the sheer, angry emotionalism that was coming at me. How could I dare say anything bad about social networking? Didn’t I know that Web 2.0 and social networking was making the government transparent, feeding starving folks in developing nations, and helping marketing communications teams side-step the treacherous processes of the IT department? This was it. Web Nirvana. The future is now. It’s all good and it’s only going to get gooder.

On the way back home from this encounter I said to a colleague: “Wow, these people have really drunk the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid.” And then, because I’m a stream of consciousness thinker, I thought about Jonestown and then I thought: Wow! Is Web 2.0 a cult?

So, I decided to take a deeper look at Web 2.0 and its followers to see if indeed a cult had formed. In the spirit of 2.0, I’m using Wikipedia content as my sole source for definitions of terms. And, in order to stay within the concentration limit and scientific method of the social networking community, I’ll only take a quick tweet-speed look at three cult characteristics as a sample: Mind Control, Love-Bombing and Coercive Persuasion and then come to a conclusion. Why over complicate things?

Mind Control 2.0

From what I can tell, mind control means making somebody think something other than what they’d think if they weren’t thinking about what you mind-controlled them to think about. Web 2.0 does that. Let’s take an example. You log on to Facebook with the sole purpose of saying "Happy Birthday" to your Mom and then getting back to work. Two hours later, you’re still on Facebook taking the quiz, “What Kind of Shoe are You?” Other examples of Mind Control 2.0 are thinking that you have more friends than you do because 10,000 people are following you on Twitter and feeling that it’s OK that you stepped over the half-frozen homeless guy on the corner next to your apartment because you’ve got money in Kiva.

Love-Bombing 2.0

Love-Bombing is when a bunch of people who barely know you act like they like you a whole lot so you’ll stay in the cult. This one is a no brainer. Ever get one of those messages that says: “Hey, it’s my cousin Alex’s birthday. Everybody tweet him and say 'Happy Birthday'.” That’s Love Bombing 2.0. It’s also referred to as Love Spam and, like your e-mail Spam, it grows like a fungus. Love Bombing also looks good from the outside. So, it’s something good to point to if you’re a Web 2.0 Cult recruiter. Wouldn’t you like to be amongst those that get 107 people to say "Happy Birthday" to you on Facebook? It looks so good. So happy.

Coercive Persuasion 2.0

Coercive Persuasion is trying to get a rational person with a well thought out opinion to change their mind about something so that they believe the same thing you believe so you get to feel better about yourself and be “right.” This is what I think was happening to me. Someone was trying to mind control me into thinking that Web 2.0 had no negatives associated with it even though I know it does. It almost worked too. I know what’s coming after this. It’s the good old “it’s not the technology that’s bad; it’s the people that use the technology that are bad” argument. It’s worked for the National Rifle Association so it ought to work for those Web 2.0 evangelists too. Good luck with that.

So, based on my thorough analysis 2.0, I think that we can see that Web 2.0 is a cult.

I’m only half kidding here. I know that these new software designs and business models that we call Web 2.0 are extremely powerful. I know a lot of people have and will continue to make a lot of money off of Web 2.0. I know a lot of people will be helped because of Web 2.0. But some people will be hurt by it and be ripped off online and lose their identity or purpose in a sea of packets. Some businesses might expose themselves to risk.  So we should all be careful. That’s all.

So, here’s my delayed prosaic rebuttal to the one who accused me of missing the train:

Nothing is so risk-free or perfect it need not be examined. Ease of use, popularity and wide-spread adoption are not indicators of correctness or quality. Things that people invent are tools, not saviors. Whether a business or an individual, consider the consequences of your actions and the impact that a single tweet or gesture can have coupled with the global, real-time, 24/7 nature of the Web. Be in awe of the Web and have a little fear. Then, go ahead and use Web 2.0 to make the world a better place.

Or in Tweet length: Moderation in all things; and, play nice.