In their paper 'Could the Web be a Temporary Glitch?', Carr, Pope and Halford conclude with these words:
'Openness is a
property of the Web architecture and a contributory factor in the success of
its adoption, but it is not an inevitable property of the user experience in
the coming decade.'
This 'inevitable' clearly implies that the current situation is both dynamic and fluid. Everything in web history is about periods of transition. We don't live through periods of transition, as in the past, we live in transition. We see that in the recent past teens have moved and are moving away from facebook towards WhatsApp, WeChat and KakaoTalk. Their reasons appear to be greater privacy, restriction to friendship groups and avoidance of selfies, silly self portraits. Yet we know that despite many protestations to the contrary in the end economics take control as in almost all aspects of life (not creative commons hopefully)...so just maybe we are currently enjoying the Indian Summer of the web. Thanks to Mark Nash for his highly relevant links.
