Am I irrelevant?

Have I allowed myself to become outdated, irrelevant, inconsequential and stuck in a dark corner of the early 2000s? Has technology passed me by and been handed on to a younger generation of smart, happening geeks?

My friend Vincent called me up some months back and told me, in effect, that I have. “You’re wasting your life,” he said (I’m paraphrasing for dramatic effect). The web is no longer what it was. Building websites and web applications for corporate customers, he said, is not where the action is. “And you’re missing out,” he concluded. Actually he probably said: “Dude, you’re missing out.”

This is not my usual kind of contribution to Thought Leader. I usually try to find an opinion that causes trouble, as anyone who reads my stuff knows. But lying awake the other night, far too late to watch TV and too early to shower, his words came back to me. And I guess I started feeling that he was right.

I part-own and part-manage a substantial web-development and content-management business in Johannesburg. That’s what I’ve always done; in fact, Vincent was one of my early employees. But let’s face it, it’s a Web 1.0 business. We make corporate sites and applications, and they are distinctly old school. Yes, we use lots of new tech on the back-end. And yes, we do some cool front-end stuff, but regardless, it’s part of a different world. All the buzzing madness of social media is as far from it as Gophers were from websites.

Web 2.0 is a puzzling throng of concepts, technologies, sites, systems and companies. The best way I can think about it is as a new way of life, and the technologies that make that new way of being possible. That may sound like an overstatement, but I’m quite sure it isn’t. Taken individually, Web 2.0 applications often seem like new versions of old desktop apps. Is Google Docs just a souped-up MS Word? Is Facebook just email on steroids? Are blogs just personal web pages updated more often?

But this is to miss the most important characteristics of this “new” web. It is, for those immersed and engaged with it, a new way of life. This is for two reasons. First, information is no longer “locked” in the site-search engine embrace; it’s fragmented and free, and it can be aggregated and mashed-up. And, to get poetic, it is reduced to semantic particles that regroup to form many different entities.

Second, people are now connected to one another in multidimensional ways. Where communicating online used to mean email or Usenet or MSN, now we are connected via our preferences, our interests, our opinions. Our online representations have relationships with one another. It’s nothing as crude as meeting people with similar ideas. It’s about being part of a shared reality, a shared universe that is springing into being out of the content we are all adding to it.

It’s this universe from which I was feeling excluded. And, I think, Vincent’s point was that I was contributing nothing to it. Or too little, anyway.

I actually don’t think Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 are accurate characterisations, since the one does not replace the other. In fact, it would be better to see them largely as two different things: Web Part 1 and Web Part 2. There will always be corporate information and online marketing and that kind of old-style content on the web. It may get more dynamic or more multimedia, but it’ll always be there. There just isn’t another way to get that stuff across. Part 1.

The 2.0 stuff adds another layer to the web — one that enriches it, shakes it up and acknowledges an underlying need that I have always suspected drove the growth of the web to begin with: a desire to feel part of something big, and to be a meaningful part of it. More on that in a future post.

Waking up the other day, feeling tired and old, I reflected on what I do, and what I ought to do. And I guess my conclusion is that I’m too young and it’s too early in the day to start getting all morose and getting out my pipe and tweed jacket and settling in for the duration in a comfortable rocking chair.

This new web is about living it. Not in order to be cool or relevant, actually, but because like any geek, I think it’s fun and useful and it’s something that excites me. It’s what we all — Part 1s and 2s alike — have been working toward, evolving into. And what it’s calling me — and everyone, actually — to do is to become a part of it.