The Politics of Book Clubs in Web 2.0

While digging through the usual archives of digital scholarship, I have stumbled on an interesting short article, a 2012 editorial by Marla Mallette of Binghamton University, titled "Web 2.0 and Literacy: Enacting a Vision, Imagining the Possibilities". The short editorial, written for an issue of Research In the Schools dedicated to Web 2.0 and literacy, is overall one of the many techno-positivist commentaries that, periodically, enthusiastically rehash the utopian possibilities of the Web's famous second iteration. It offers very little of new as far as apologies or the cautionary goes, and one gets the sense that, since the early 2000s, very little of paradigmatically new has happened on the Web- especially as the various Semantic Web / Internet of Things revolutions still offer little tangible improvement over the 'Internet of People".

 What really interests me about the editorial is a side note: the first person retelling by the author of an encounter with Oprah Winfrey's "Oprah's Book Club 2.0", a 2012 revitalisation of the media mogul's Book Club with an added twist: users could interact and discuss with other club members also through Twitter, Facebook and e-Readers. It should be noted that the original Book Club was mostly known for skyrocketing obscure titles into fame, the so-called 'Oprah Effect', a phenomenon that seems to have carried over into the club's digital incarnation up to its petering out in 2014.

Marla Mallette has an interesting and, in many ways, typically 'Web 2.0' reaction toward Oprah's Book Club 2.0. In the main body of the article, the author identifies six key points that make up the Web 2.0's ideology: 1) User-generated content 2) Harness the power of the crowds 3) Big Data 4) Architecture of participation 5) Network effect 6) Openness. A fairly standard list of what sets apart Web 1.0 ad Web 2.0. She then applies these six traits of Web 2.0 to the case of Oprah's Book Club 2.0, arguing that each one of them but openness is displayed there: users can generate relevant responses and content through a networked architecture of participation that is not radically, but still somewhat open. The metrics by which the success, or the 'amelioration' provided by the meeting of the Book Club and Web 2.0 is, however, eminently quantitative. A fair amount of data is presented as a sign of the success of Oprah's enterprise: the first featured book went from near-obscurity all the way to the top positions of Amazon's sales, thanks to the grassroots effort of Oprah's 7,000,000 Facebook and 12,000,000 Twitter followers (Mallette, iii).

There is, however, no attempt to even suggest that metrics and quantitative data (aka numbers) might not tell the whole, or the most important story. The Book Club, in both of its incarnations, is one extreme example of how one personality, well positioned in the commodity flux of contemporary social and emotive capital, can act as a cultural gatekeeper that sets trends and agendas that could potentially become culturally hegemonic. These agendas are not, of course, guaranteed to be adopted by the public of the capitalist spectacle; nonetheless, the Book Club's propelling power suggests in this direction, at least in our specific case.

When such ambigious dynamics enter the supposedly user-oriented environment of Web 2.0, the matter further complicates. Is the presence of such powerful cultural gatekeepers tolerable, when the Web is supposed to be about grassroots power and the 'wisdom of the crowd'? how far can this wisdom of the crowd be, or should be directed by big players, and to what more or less acceptable levels and ends? In this sense, true success stories of 'gatekeeping from below' are far and in between: much more frequent is the scenario in which the users' work and efforts to be social and networked are datamined for profit by a few big players (Facebook; Amazon; a myriad of casual games); and the Web seems, for the most part, a context in which consensus is formed and carefully piloted in ways that do not differ too much from the real world.

In the end, when technopositivism and the Web meet, Big Data-fuelled enthusiasm over big numbers and the success stories they seem to tell overshadow deeper issues that cannot be easily measured, but remain within the realm of possibility and have much deeper ethical implications that the few notes above can hope to cover. We remain with the problem of understanding how far numbers, the new academic obsession, can represent social dynamics that could, potentially, endanger a culturally significant space such as the Web.