In the continuing effort to define the artist currently known as Web 2.0, danah boyd brings in the concept of glocalization, which is about envisioning Web 2.0 as foregrounding the need for local communities and communities of practice to situate global information in local contexts. Local here is not defined as it once was by geography, but rather by shared interests, goals, values and projects.

Web 1.0 was the exuberance of believing that we could construct some universal, global commons in which everyone is connected and everybody has equal access to the same information. Now it's becoming clear that there is no such thing as "universal information" — information needs to be interacted with, remixed, repurposed, reused, recreated and shared in order for it to be truly useful to groups in their own local contexts. Think of the parallels in education, and the difference between being a passive absorber of facts handed down versus an active participant in engaging with the material to create new recombinant forms. In order to make sense of new information, we have to situate it inside the local contexts that are relevant to us — this operates on the individual level in a learning environment as well as at the community level, as groups of individuals need to make decisions on how to best take action in response to the knowledge they have at hand.

Zoom out to current day, where we see real battles being waged on the IP and copyleft fronts regarding the ownership of information. This is because Web 2.0 is pushing us down the continuum from total ownership to creative re-use and sharing, which are at odds. The tools of Web 2.0 are giving both local communities and individuals the power to repurpose information in ways that make it more useful to them. The reason these tools pull on us so strongly is because our brains are natural remix tools. As soon as new information enters the cortex, it’s already been altered in its quest to become integrated into what’s already swirling there. We have to interact to understand. Entertainment industry lawyers can enforce legislation that prevents you from producing an unauthorized remix of your favorite tune, but they’re fighting an uphill battle against the legion of natural mashups that will always exist in our brains. To think is to remix.

For this reason I’m throwing seven hands in the air behind the concept of glocalization, but I feel there’s also a necessary third axis to Web 2.0: global <—-> local <—-> individual. The interplay of information flow between the axes is not cleanly divided but chaotic and, as danah points out, the tools we build to support that flow have to be extremely flexible and extremely open. If we really want to make ourselves useful in this process as toolmakers, we’re going to have to step out from behind the veil of our own technogeekery and look at how people in local social and cultural contexts — the vast majority of whom are not technologists — are actually using our tools. Perhaps just as critically, we should be finding out why folks are not using our tools, and how we could make them useful enough to become more interesting.