Wielding new media in Web 2.0: exploring the history of engagement with the collaborative construction of media products

This article explores what is new about Web 2.0, the contemporary cutting-edge platform for web development, differentiating between what is celebrated in the discourse of Web 2.0 and what is genuinely novel about this phenomenon, which is users’ propensity to construct content in the form of information and media products for the web environment. It argues that, from the perspective of theoretical treatments of the ‘active audience’, audiences or media users have created media content on a long-term and consistent historical basis for purposes related to radical and community movements.The article further considers expressive and aesthetic dimensions of Web 2.0 content construction through a discussion of three historical case studies of ‘participatory public art’ which, it is suggested, constitute a useful analogy for understanding similarly oriented Web 2.0 content construction. Finally, it proposes topics 155 new media & society Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC Vol11(1&2): 155–178 [DOI: 10.1177/1461444808099580]