Web 2.0 as an Autopoietic System - Implications for Innovative Web-Interfaces

The Web 2.0 can be regarded as an evolutionary process of medial differentiation. Infinite online communities are emerging and disappearing. It seems that a race has started in searching for innovative web-interfaces. Already many helpful technological principles and features are executed by web experts. Although they give helpful orientation for designing innovative and interactive web-interfaces, they lack dealing with self-organising systems such as online communities. Therefore, I promote an extended notion of the web-interface. Such perspective includes reconsidering the constitutive characteristic of online communities: the autopoiesis. This is an essential concept of social system theory, which is new in context of designing innovative web-interfaces. Consequently, the goal of this paper is not a technological solution, but which will give a new perspective with implications for technology. One essential consequence is that a designer or programmer cannot be more than a perturbator and experimentator – intending to learn more about the social system. Therefore, I propose to generate knowledge for an innovative and human centred Web 2.0 interface with focus on qualitative and participatory research. This approach allows generating most appropriate design interventions with the users of an online community themselves. Keyword: communication, media, web 2.0, social systems, autopoiesis, emergence, extended interface notion, qualitative research