Welcome to the Web 2.0 Book Club!
The Web 2.0 Book Club is a year-long project by Tim Hwang to engage in a critical rereading of some of the bestselling books from the heady days of the participatory internet, circa 2000 to 2010.
Our purpose, collectively, is to explore three questions:
In the harsh light of 2022, what did these writers get right? What did they get absolutely wrong?
How do we put these writers into their historical context? What were the broader implications of their theories on platform design and technology advocacy?
What lessons do we draw from the fate of “Web 2.0” discourse as we think about what the internet should look into the 2020s and 2030s?
2022 Books
For the first season of Web 2.0 Book Club, we’ll be reading and discussing four books in order of their publication year, one per quarter:
Q1 (Jan-Mar): Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (2004)
Q2 (Apr-Jun): Chris Anderson, The Long Tail (2006)
Q3 (Jul-Sept): Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (2008)
Q4 (Oct-Dec): Sherry Turkle, Alone Together (2011)
Membership
Membership in the Web 2.0 Book Club costs $5 per month. As part of your membership, you get the following:
At least once a month, a subscribers-only discussion post for the community, tackling a specific aspect of the book for the quarter.
At the end of each quarter, we’ll be hosting a subscribers-only live panel event over Zoom to discuss the book along with a guest speaker.
You can join or terminate your subscriptions at any time. You can read more about the motivations for this project in our intro post here.
