by Sören Stamer October 13, 2006 at 12:49 AM

The annual MEDIENTAGE MÜNCHEN are nearly on us, starting on October 18 next week. One expected topic – perhaps indeed the most important one – of the many crammed into those three days, will be Web 2.0.

Indeed, this year I will be given the signal honor of being allowed to introduce the panel discussion “Web 2.0 – how is the Internet changing?” following the keynote of Jonathan Miller, Chairman and CEO of AOL. And I’ll do this by challenging some basic assumptions, since I don’t think that this is the question that we should be asking. For the foundations of the Internet, its concepts, possibilities, and standards, are not really being changed by Web 2.0: all of these had already been invented by 1990.

If Web 2.0 means change, then it’s not a technical change, but first and foremost a social one.

In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan taught us that “the medium is the message”. If I’ve understood him correctly, this means that the true significance of a medium (its message) lies in its effect on society – an effect that is hard to overestimate. The printing press, argues McLuhan, did not simply enable mass distribution of a great diversity of texts and bring about the birth of the paper industry: at the same time it fundamentally shaped the way we think today. Accordingly, the ability to think through chains of effects and evidence results from the serial structure evidenced by books. Shaped in this way, we were effectively unable to imagine anything else – until the mass distribution of hypertexts became reality.

The Internet is thus another one of McLuhan’s powerful mediums: it is changing the way we think. And this is one of the senses in which Web 2.0 can be understood: a change from a paradigm of planned hierarchies to one of dynamic self-organization. Put bluntly: Wikipedia beats Brockhaus.

I’m convinced that this paradigm shift will have serious consequences. It will fundamentally change us all: our private lives, our jobs, how we do business – and society itself.

The cornerstone of my argument is this: in at most five to ten years, businesses based on the classical, hierarchical paradigm will be in serious difficulties. Young consumers, recent graduates and candidates for senior management will all expect the company to involve them more and regulate them less, and to offer up its opinions freely on both internal and external company blogs. Feedback, freely given, will be unavoidable. Companies that seek to prevent this will be able to read the inevitable criticism from customers and employees somewhere on the Internet. Those who try and stop this are doomed to failure: at the end of the day, both customers and high potentials will simply vote with their feet.

By the way, dynamic self-organization is the driving force behind Linux, Skype, Del.icio.us, eBay, science, free markets, evolution, and life as well.