Wesley and MacLean’s model of communication, 1957A B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZWin 1992 by Tim Berners-Lee at the European
Nuclear Research Centre as a computer network
capable of delivering information more swiftly
and comprehensively than any previous delivery
system. Darin Barney in Prometheus Wired:
Th e Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network
Technology (University of Chicago Press, 2002)
writes, ‘Information on the Web is organized as a
massive, searchable database of “pages” existing,
not in just a single computer somewhere, but
in all the computers linked to the network via
servers.’ Th us the Web is a network that ‘is itself
a giant expanding database’ capable of linking
documents, etc. to any number of other Web
documents, brought about by hypertexting.
The Web, Barney points out, ‘accentuates
the capacity of networks to enmesh with one
another and become networks of networks in an
exponentially increasing matrix of connectivity’.
See cyberspace; internet. See also topic
guides under digital age communication;
media technologies.
▶David Gaunlett and Ross Horsley, eds, Web Studies
(Arnold, 2004).
Wedom, Theydom Version of ‘Them-and-Us’.
John Hartley uses the term in The Politics of
Pictures: Th e Creation of the Public in the Age
of Popular Media (Routledge, 1992) to describe
the binary nature of popular journalism. Hartley
sees the practices of popular journalism as being
determinedly adversarial in nature, defi ning the
world in terms of opposites – private and public,
reality and illusion, allies and enemies. He speaks
of a tradition of ‘foe creation’ which is related to
notions of order, and the upholding of it.
What the press does, he argues, is operate a
‘process of photographic negativization, where
the image of order is actually recorded as its own
negative, in stories of disorder’. In Visualizing
Deviance: A Study of News Organizations (Open
University Press, 1989), Richard Ericson, Patricia
Baraneh and Janet Chan had come to the same
conclusion: ‘In sum,’ they argue, ‘journalists are
central agents in the reproduction of order.’
★Wesley and MacLean’s model of commu-
nication, 1957 In their article ‘A conceptual
model for communications research’ in Jour-
nalism Quarterly, 34, B.H. Wesley and M.S.
MacLean develop newcomb’s abx model of
communication, 1953 with the aim of encapsu-
lating the overall mass communication process.
To Newcomb’s A (communicator) B (communi-
cator) X (any event or object in the environment
of A, B which is the subject of communication),
Wesley and MacLean add a fourth element, C.
This represents the editorial communicatingcommunication and the growth of the network
society. First use of the term is considered to
be by Dale Dougherty, Vice-President of the
O’Reilly Media corporation in 2004, during
a team discussion ahead of an international
conference of web operators and participants, a
think-tank gathered to point the way ahead for
global networking.
Tim O’Reilly, the driving-force behind the
notion of Web 2.0, published an influential
paper in 2005, ‘What is Web 2.0: design, patterns
and business models for the new generation
of software?’ This included reference to key
features of Web 2.0, such as participation, with
the emphasis on the Net user as contributor.
O’Reilly’s prime focus was the multiplication
of Net uses driven by the possibilities of new
technology in the context of the incursion of
powerful corporate and government players, this
raising far-reaching issues concerning the public
and private domain.
Inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim
Berners Lee, sees the factors that characterize
Web 2.0 as simply an extension of the original
ideas and direction of the Web. However, 2005
and the name Web 2.0 mark a lift-off in the ways
users interact with each other, typical of those
ways being blogging – user-generated content
(UGC), interactivity, syndication, multi-media
sharing, data transmitted and received on an
epical scale, and openness as never experienced
previously in the world of communications.
Paul Anderson in a paper for JISC Technol-
ogy and Standards Watch, ‘What is Web 2.0?
Ideas, technologies and implications for educa-
tion’ (2007), sees a crucial element of Web 2.0
as harnessing ‘the power of the crowd’. In his
conclusion he writes that collective power will
become ‘more important as the Web facilitates
new communities and groups. A corollary to this
is that online identity and privacy will become a
source of tension’. Further, ‘the growth in user or
self-generated content, the rise of the amateur
and a culture of DIY will challenge conventional
thinking on who exactly does things, who has
knowledge, what it means to have élites, status
and hierarchy’.
New technology, Anderson stresses, has in the
age of Web 2.0, ‘lowered the barrier to entry’ in
Net communication: ‘Collaboration, contribu-
tion and community are the order of the day, and
there is a sense in which some think that a new
“social fabric” is being constructed before our
eyes.’ See network neutrality; network-
ing: social networking.
Web: World Wide Web (www) Formulated