Maybe I’m in a grouchy place, from jetlag or lack of coffee or too much coffee. But I think I’ve decided to never use the term “Web 2.0″ again, except maybe to speak critically about it as a construct. I know its almost as popular to bash the term as to use it, so I’m not cutting any edge here. But I’m finding it exhausting in this conference, and I realize that I may have used it in my own presentation - in fact, I’m not even sure if I did or not, which is disturbing.

This is partly inspired by David Berry’s talk, in which he critiques the term as an “imaginary technology,” one that, in fact, was meant not as a category but as a manifesto of principles when Tim O’Reilly first coined it. David made an excellent point, which is that it is dangerous for scholars to turn to study a phenomenon, and do so by accepting a term manufactured to describe it, and manufactured by interested parties. (I particularly loved that he kept calling it “2-point-naught.”) But its also a reaction to the way this term has so insinuated itself into this conversation. Precisely because the conference called itself “Politics 2.0″ has made it such this term, on a regular basis, gets used by presenters as not a manufactured term, or even a set of principles, but a matter-of-fact category of technologies out there.

It is a singularly useless and shamefully promotional term, and plays into our worst habits as academics, intellectual laziness and over-simplification as insight.