What is it with this buzzword 'web3'? What does it really mean? In this first of a series of articles, we will be exploring this term and introducing how this approach to the internet might affect cultural institutions.
But understanding how web3 works requires us to take a step back and understand what happened during web1 and web2.
The ‘Read Only’ Internet
Firstly, web1 is categorized as the first stage of the internet or the world wide web (WWW) from 1991 to around 2004. As often cited, Tim Berner Lee (the man behind the WWW) regarded this stage as the ‘read-only’ web for its focus on connectivity but lack of focus on interactivity. In other words, the first stages of the internet focused on enabling users to search for and ‘read’ information but there was a lack of engagement with this information.
The same can be seen within the history of museums on the web. By the late 1990s, cultural institutions were grappling with ways of using the web as an extension, or (to quote Malroux (1967)) as a ‘museum without walls’, an idea which is only accentuated by looking at the types of discussions on offer in the first program for the Museum and the Web conference in 1997. From ‘building a website’ workshops, talks on intranets, to publishing content online for access and research, there is a sense of a ‘read only’ rhetoric in these early days of museums on the web.
The ‘Read & Write’ Internet
But in keeping with Museum and the Web conferences, a few years later (circa 2004) we can start to see a change in the discourse, where the focus is interactivity and participation. Web2 represents this point of departure, and it is often identified as the internet that emerged after the dot.com bubble in 2004 and the development of social media platforms such as Flickr, Reddit, Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter. As Ross Parry wrote in his book Recording the Museum, web2 also led to the aspiration of the ‘personal museum’, where there is a shift to exploring personalization and engagement. This also included ‘folksonomy’ tagging, crowdsourcing, as well as blogs and social media. In each case, the viewer becomes a participant as they can not only ‘read’ but also ‘write’.
The ‘Read, Write and Execute’ Internet
This leaves us with web3, or to follow the analogy, the web where you can ‘read, write and execute’. Web3 was originally viewed as a form of ‘semantic web’ or a network that allows data to be aggregated and shared across different online platforms. But what truly differentiates web3 from its predecessors is the autonomous user. In other words, users can both ‘read’, ‘write’ and ‘execute’ their own actions without needing an intermediary. This is possible with the use of a blockchain, a type of distributed ledger technology, and cryptocurrencies and NFTs, which enables users to exchange tokens of value without needing an intermediary such as a bank.
Therefore, web3 dreams of creating a more democratic internet through decentralization.
