Anne Truitt Zelenka

The second generation of the Web represents a radical shift relative to the first. A number of trends underpin it… trends that change the way many of us work. These new ways of working don’t eclipse the old ways but play out alongside them, creating a parallel culture of work.

The older and newer cultures of work could be described as busyness and burst-based, respectively. Earlier, I described the burst style of work as an entirely new paradigm. Maybe a more useful way to look at it is as a different culture, with different norms and taboos, with different opportunity and compensation structures as well. Some workers are bicultural — they can adapt to the older or to the newer way of working.

The shifts underpinning the development of the new web working culture are these:

• From corporate to individual
• From marketing spin to authenticity
• From defined to emergent
• From money to attention
• From proprietary to open
• From software to webware

From corporate to individual. The first version of the Web was settled mostly by for-profit organizations like Amazon, eBay, and iVillage. Individuals appeared mainly as consumers, as in B2C, which meant business-to-consumer selling, or as the audience for large media efforts. Individuals could also join communities, but they didn’t have identity separate from the communities they joined. Individuals were secondary to organizations of people.

In the second version of the Web, the individual is the new group. Even though individuals still work for, buy from, and form loose or tightly-structured groups of people, individuals now take a place as negotiators, communicators, and collaborators in their own right. Through blogging, individuals can raise their own voices. Through social networking, individuals can connect outside formal organizational boundaries. Through open source software projects, individuals can develop their reputations separate from corporate work.

From marketing spin to authenticity. With the rise of the individual comes an emphasis on honestly and sincerely expressing your individuality. Authenticity gains new credibility and value while marketing spin feels more fake and unwanted than ever. Companies struggle to find a way to express themselves in ways that seem real but still promote the profit-making purpose.

Amateur videos are prized for their freshness to the point that authentic-seeming video diaries like that of lonelygirl15 create buzz and excitement despite their amateurishness (or perhaps because of it). Wal-Mart and their PR firm Edelman are criticized mercilessly by the tech blogosphere for faking and funding a cross-country driving trip writing about stops at Wal-Mart.

Corporate employees seek ways of relating that meet their obligations to their companies while they retain their individuality.

From defined to emergent. Or, from top down to bottom up. Or, from command and control to experimental. These are all variations of the same thing. If individuals are defining and driving what happens, the result is less predictable and less controlled than if large organizations are doing so. Here’s where the Wisdom of Crowds kicks in. It’s not that groups are smarter than individuals; it’s that individual decisions aggregated together give you the best results. That’s emergent knowledge.

Examples of emergent structures include open source organizational structure and projects, Wikipedia knowledge aggregation, Agile software development practices compared to waterfall development, and segments of the blogosphere developing according to individual interests and attention.

From money to attention. In Web 1.0, the real-world model of selling was transferred wholesale online. Pets.com tried to sell pet food and supplies with the Web as its main channel.

Attention is the currency of the realm in Web 2.0. If you have enough page views, you can convert them into money or sell your website to the highest bidder (who will often bid very high indeed).

What this means for working individuals is that working to attain attention is almost or more effective than working directly for money. If you have the means to support yourself while you work for attention, efforts to gain attention will soon turn into money.

From proprietary to open. In the late ’90s, Microsoft Windows was the most common operating system, and Internet Explorer the most common web browser. Today that’s still the case, but open source alternatives Linux and Firefox have become the choice of a growing and satisfied minority. The book The Cathedral & The Bazaar by Eric Raymond outlines how an open source development model provides a more flexible model for software development, one which may produce software that better suits users’ needs.

Open is not only about software source code, though. The cracking of the group hold on online action, the rise of the individual, the sprouting of the attention economy all lead to a new openness. No longer do individuals hide their quirks — many of them proclaim them publicly, on a MySpace page or using Twitter or with shared Flickr photos.

This trend supports and is supported by the trend towards authenticity. Open source development models feel more authentic than proprietary models. Authenticity requires openness about ideals and values.

From software to webware. We could as easily call this shift “from shrinkwrapped to software as a service” because it amounts to the same thing. The old way of getting software was to buy it in a shrinkwrapped box, load the software onto your PC via a CD, and then keep it maintained and upgraded yourself. The new way involves accessing software with your web browser from any PC then letting the developer update and maintain it. This means we have an unprecedented ability to try new capabilities and put them into practice with little risk to our PCs or our pocketbooks.

Webware follows different pricing models thank shrinkwrapped software. Web pricing models range from free to priced by the drink, and make it much more feasible for an individual to establish on online presence or even create his own web service online. Amazon Web Services, Google’s free suite of online applications, open source software that also happens to be free for the taking… this represents a major trend of importance on the Web making it more feasible for employees to become entrepreneurs in their spare time.

The new mode of individual/authentic/emergent/attentive/webware-based work doesn’t replace the old mode of corporate/ marketing/defined/monetary/software-based work. We could likely find examples where these characteristics are bundled in a different way: for example in Yahoo’s Brickhouse innovation incubator, a corporate organization tries to create value and innovate with an emergent rather than defined development model and as another example, advertising-funded media properties have long exploited attention to make money.