User:Marie Wocher/Thesis Outline

Like I said in my project proposal, the reason why I want to investigate how we acquire, participate and process knowledge on the web is, because I grew up believing that the web knows everything and that it will change everything. I believed that the web will make me happier, better and smarter, that it would help me in finding answers to all questions I have. But I start realizing that the knowledge on the Web is very limited and I don't get my questions answered which leads to disappointment. I would like to find out where this promise, that the Web knows everything and will change everything has its origin and from whom I adapted this belief. What where the general expectations of the web , what did the web actually promise? What did we believe concerning the Web in the beginning, how did it change and where are we now? Which promises are fulfilled and which are not fulfilled?

My aim is to answer the question why there is this disillusion of promises. I want to examine it from following positions.

a) ideologists

like Bruno Latour and Michelle Serres who saw the web as this massive opportunity and predict that the web will cause a deep social and educational transformation

Manuel Castells - The Theory of the Network Society


Michel Serres -


Jean-Francois Lyotard – The Postmodern Condition

Ted Turner - computer lib/ dream machines (new media reader)

b) technologists

1) going back to the very beginning of the idea of the network

2) looking to newer 'technologists' like Corry Doctrow who are criticizing the situation with Social Network Sites during the Arab spring for example

Charlie Gere - Digital Culture

Richard Barbrook - The California ideology

Stewart Brand - From Counterculture to Cyberculture

c) the market

the opportunists that where tapping into this idealism and make a product out of it. The market used the opportunities of the web to make money out of it (idealism versus pragmatism)

Disillusion of the web by the example of Wikipedia

In 2001 they started with the idea of bringing together the knowledge of the world by inviting everyone to participate. Now the debate is about commercial advertising and legal issues and the disillusionment that Wikipedia is not written by the population at large Why did Wikipedia fail, did it fail?