Web 2.0 and Beyond

20    ◾     Web 2.0 and Beyond: Principles and Technologies

counter-culture movement. One might add to this the rise of DIY music in the late 1970s

through the punk rock movement.

2.3.1 The Roots of UGC

For Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Web’s inventor, UGC is what the Web was always intended

to be. If we look at the history of the development of the Web we can see that his original

vision was very much of a collaborative workspace where everything was potentially linked

to everything in a “single, global information space” (Berners-Lee 1999, 5) and, crucially

for this discussion, the assumption was that “everyone would be able to edit in this space” ...