Despite all Hype around Social Media, I do not consider that the relevant part of this “moment 2.0′′” is marked by Social Networking.
MySpace was recently launched in Portugal (or is it just... in Portuguese?) with the right to a party at Lux and various promotional initiatives, Facebook has had what I call the “TiVo effect” (both marked a moment “outside”, without ever having had it “inside”), other networks have happened; Hi5 has happened, especially for younger generations (this comment makes me feel “old”), LinkedIN happened in the professional sense; in local version, we have TheStarTracker; Twitter, despite adding a small Portuguese minority; more recently, the plurk effect; my favorite, FriendFeed; and could continue to list examples that appear almost daily.
What really marks this moment is, and will increasingly be, the exit of the Browser to other interfaces (Last.FM and Twitter, with its “n” customers, are good examples), the RSS and the aggregation of content and the “Mashups”, where the aggregation of content is taken further.
And “ Mashups ” begin to be everywhere and in different formats. If on the one hand we have basic and functional formats such as aggregating sites/blogues, the recent fashion of Widgets or brutal ones Yahoo Pipes, we have many other formats of “mashups” (such as the Weezer video, in the previous post ).
See the birth of a new format in the song: the VideosSongs. Videosongs allow extending the concept of music recorded in the room with the old analog track recorder (someone remember? Did anyone waste hours mixing guitars with basic keys?) and do the same but... with video. And then publish on YouTube. At MetaCafe. In whatever-video-site-that-many-see.
If we look at the whole initial movement of Pop Art, this new era of “mashups” is not very different from the collages of a “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? “, or Andy Warhol’s polaroids. These new “collages” that 2.0 brings us, and all forms of aggregation, are not very different from those used in the different approaches of Pop Art. We're just stuck with aesthetic stereotypes that don't let us see the new forms of media that today merge into its aesthetic and functional component.
Looking back and reviewing Lawrence Alloway's essay “The Arts and the Mass Media” that many believe gave rise to the term Pop Art, it is not difficult to extrapolate new “Arts” and new “Media” and a new Pop Art... in version 2.0. A new Pop Art that like the first version has everything to do with “Mass Media”, “Mass Market”. More importantly... it has everything to do with all of us, the participants in this “moment 2.0′′”.