Web2.0 is global tribalization

It is much easier to talk about web2.0 from technology perspectives such as round corner css design, ajax javascripting, RESTful APIs, RSS/ATOM feeds, CDN, cloud computing, or the social application buzz words like wiki, blog, podcast, SNS, etc. However, it is difficult to reach consensus on the wikipedia definition. Tim O'Reilly coined web2.0 for "web as a platform". The immediate question could be, what the heck is the "platform"? Marc Andreessen even defined 3 levels of platforms in defending Ning's position against Facebook social platform.

Web2.0 is a culture movement
The evolution of web platform constantly reshapes our cyberculture in terms of the way people interacting each other. The collective view of our social intercourse that morphed in cyberspace is a cultural phenomenon, as we have experienced with AIM culture, Myspace culture, Facebook culture, Twitter culture. It is prominent in digital divide among age groups. The usage of fast pacing digital media distinguishes cultural demographics. As a sociologist discovered earlier based on social class analysis, Facebook was favored by rich kids from private universities, while poor community college students felt more comfortable to hang out in Myspace. When web platform functions as media, the usage of such media shapes our culture. Moreover, the culture morphing is the natural selection process in technology evolution chain. Cool and fancy technologies can die in cradle if there is no cultural adaptation.

Global village as a result of mass media
From wikipedia:

Global village is a term coined by Wyndham Lewis in his book America and Cosmic Man (1948). However, Herbert Marshall McLuhan also wrote about this term in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962). His book describes how electronic mass media collapse space and time barriers in human communication, enabling people to interact and live on a global scale. In this sense, the globe has been turned into a village by the electronic mass media.

From newspaper, radio, television, to Web1.0 version of Internet (Yahoo portal and Google search), the mass media made the world small, flat, and within instant reach. Mass media as a part our postmodern life, the culture of the global village created the problem of "singular modernity" as summarized by Fredric Jameson. The singular ideology or totalitarianism built up with the assistance of mass media, in Jameson's opinion, "secures the notions of progress and the future under the auspices of global-capitalism while preemptively dismissing any alternative as un-modern, outmoded, or old-fashioned". Global village is the colonization of the singular cultural sphere.

Tribalization as a result of web2.0 culture
Youtube (or UGC in general) could highlight the cultural anti-colonization in web2.0 culture movement. Time magazine's Person of Year in 2006 was "You". Social apps connect these individualized identities throughout tribalized explicit social networks or implicit social connotations (e.g. sharing same tags in del.icio.us). World wide tribalization is coming!

Ontologies of the present demand archaeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past - Fredric Jameson