Web 2.0 (dynamic or user-generated content) is almost all I have ever known of the internet and therefore my first thought when the question of “What is web 2.0?” is posed, is why is that important?
To me, defining what web 2.0 is has helped me to consider what it is to different groups of people. The 2018 We are Social: Digital Report highlighted to me that across the world the adoption of social media and other web 2.0 technologies is not consistent and although Facebook is fairly ubiquitous, different age groups and social groups use different social media in different ways.
So my definition of web 2.0 is:
Web technology that allows the user to add and interact with content on the internet.
Defining what 2.0 is, will probably only get harder as the discussions of web 3.0 start to shape the dialogue over the future of the web, eclipsing talk of web 2.0. The “distributed web” that 3.0 discusses and the tools that it produces will also start to blur the lines of what is 2.0 and what is 3.0. To some extent this is already occurring with the popularity of messaging apps. The clean definition of social media versus peer-to-peer messaging is becoming increasingly blurred and with the importance placed on privacy and end-to-end encryption will result in more and more content being held on private networks and inaccessible via the internet (as we know it today).