Introduction

No mass medium has come to replace another. Instead, some came to expand the operation,

reach and even user participation of the other. This is the case between the old (conventional) and

the new media. The new media, which is often regarded as interconnected links and tools

available on the Internet is also evolving. While the rest of the conventional mass media of radio,

television, newspaper and magazine are referred to as old media. Notwithstanding, these

conventional media are also evolving into other forms and adopting new faces on the internet.

Therefore, internet, as a converging point, brings together, different media channels. And so, one

is expanding the others and never to replace. An instance is Web2 .0 and social media. Before

Web 2.0, there was and there is still web 1.0. The latter helped the former to expand and birthed

what is now known as social media. On this note, this paper intends to discuss the contributions

of Web 2.0 to the emergence of social media.

Brief conceptualization of terms

For Web 2.0 and social media and any other concepts in the field of communication and media

studies, there is hardly to say this or that definition is the universal one. And so, there is no

generally acceptable definition of what Web 2.0 and social media, because of their nature of

evolvement, users, reasons why they are used and level of interactivity.

To begin with, a web is a collection of interconnected links. It is commonly referred to as World

Wide Web (WWW); a subset of the Internet, which consists of different pages or links that can

be accessed using a web browser by anyone (Yasar, 2023). To get a web, someone must have to

design it. In the past, it was web 1.0. A kind of web or pages in which one cannot alter its

contents. Web 1.0, according to Kenton (2022), is used to describe the first stage of the Internet.

At this point, there were few content creators; most of those using the Internet were consumers.

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Static pages were more common than dynamic HTML, which incorporates interactive and

animated websites with specific coding language. Content in this stage came from a server’s file

system rather than a database management system. Users were able to sign online guestbooks,

and HTML forms were sent via email. Examples of Internet sites that are classified as Web1.0

are Britannica Online, personal websites that does not allow user interaction but just to view

content and go out, and mp3.com used to download music in which users cannot alter a content.

In general, these websites are static and have limited functionality and flexibility (Kenton, 2022),

Yasar (2023), defines Web 2.0 as websites and applications that make use of user-generated

content for end users. Web 2.0 is characterised by greater user interactivity and collaboration,

more pervasive network connectivity and enhanced communication channels and by implication,

Web 2.0 has improved the way internet is used and has also increased the number of people who

access and use the internet on daily basis. The term Web 2.0 was coined by information

architecture consultant Darcy DiNucci in 1999 to differentiate the post-dot-com bubble. It was

later popularized by O'Reilly Media during the Web 2.0 Conference in 2004. Yasar (2023) further

affirms that Web 2.0 reflects the new age of the internet, which puts greater emphasis on social

networking, cloud computing, higher participation levels and sharing information between

internet users. While Web 2.0 does not signify a technical upgrade, it does reflect a shift in the

way the internet is consumed. Social media sites, web apps and self-publishing platforms -- such

as Facebook and WordPress -- gained popularity during this shift.

Social media
Social media is emerging as the most vital tool of different kinds of communication which is

equipped with the ability to share information, mould opinion, connecting individuals and

communities and tool of active participation. In fact, it would be needless to say, life almost

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revolves around social media these days. Except few people in rural communities and those who

may not have financial capacity to buy internet enabled gadgets, social media has become a

household name. Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they

create, share, and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks

(Ahlqvist, & Halonen, 2008 in Kiran, 2016).

Kiran (2016) also defines social media as a group of Internet-based applications that are built on

the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and

exchange of user generated content. Furthermore, social media is available on mobile and web-

based technologies to create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and

communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content. It introduces

substantial and pervasive changes to communication between organisations, communities and

individuals. And examples of social media are but not limited to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,

TikTok, WhatsApp, WeChat, among others.

Theoretical perspective
As usual, discussions about communication and media studies may not be totally comprehensive

without the adoption of theories. There are many of these theories that are quite related to this

paper’s discourse like technology determinism theory, mediamorphosis theory, among others. By

most relevant, this paper adopts the latter. The Mediamorphosis is a theory developed Roger

Fidler that simply translates to media undergoing morphisms, which he published in his Book,

“Mediamorphosis: Understanding New Media”, in January 1997. Mediamorphosis is a unified

way of thinking about the technology evolution of communication media. Fidler derives his

mediamorphosis principles from the concept of coevolution, convergence, and complexity

(Asemah, Nwammuo, & Nkwam-Uwaoma, 2017).

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The thrust of his position is that as new media forms evolve, and develop such as web and social

media, they influence overtime and to varying degrees, the development of other existing media

such that rather than the emergent media displacing the existing one, the existing one converges

with it to enhance its operations.

The essence of mediamorphosis is the idea that the media are complex adaptive systems. That is,

the media, as other systems, respond to external pressures with a spontaneous process of self-

organization. (Asemah, Nwammuo, & Nkwam-Uwaoma, 2017). This theory is relevant to the

discussion of this paper because it helps to understand the day-to-day features and activities of

Web 2.0 and social media sites. And as stated earlier, no mass medium has come to replace or

extinct the other, instead they keep evolving and expanding into interesting, interactive and

wholesome forms. Before, we had just conventional media channels. Today, those channels have

evolved into another form of interactive media channels like podcasting, webcasting, streaming,

email broadcasting, and so on. Today, with HTML, CSS, people can mediamorphose one form of

media to another and still link them with the internet and social media sites. Therefore, the

evolvement of Web 2.0 led to the contribution in the advancement of social media networking

sites, which could be best referred theoretically as mediamorphosis.

Discussion
Indeed, Web 2.0 contributed to the emergence of social media networking sites. There came a

time when people could only access the web to get information about anything without altering

or giving feedback. At that time, it was one-way communication flow. From businesses,

organisations to individuals and it stops there. That was the era of Web 1.0. According to

Techopedia (2017), Web 1.0 was seen as a one-to-many online platform where a few businesses,

organizations and individuals held a one-way dialog with people over the internet. They could

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pass on information in a variety of ways like videos and fill the web with user-generated content.

Due to popular demand, necessity, knowledge and innovation, in 1999, the idea of Web 2.0

started coming and by 2004 O'Reilly Media during the Web 2.0 Conference made the

development of Web 2.0 popular to the entire world. The basic features that came with Web 2.0

such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and JavaScript, in addition to Ajax, RSS and Eclipse,

HTML, CSS, interactivity, user generated content, easy access, decentralisation, flexible and

multipurpose, all motivated technocrats, inventors, engineers, technologists, and even business

minded persons to start thinking of social and interactive platforms to create that can be linked to

the Web 2.0. Thus, in the same 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovits and

Chris Hughes, founded one of the most interactive and user generated content social media

platforms known as Facebook. It will be safe to say that social media is an innovation of Web 2.0

among other innovations. Social media would later become the most unique and popular

innovation of Web 2.0 (Kenton, 2022).

According to Sfetcu (2017), social media, which fits neatly under the whole Web 2.0 evolution in

that it centers around easy-to-use platforms that allow users to generate content, emerged from

the idea of Web 2.0, which specifically gave rise to interactivity on the Internet. What makes

social media unique among Web 2.0 innovations is the introduction of web-based sharing. Prior

to the creation of Twitter or Facebook, one could always email an interesting piece of content to

friends. Social media, however, simplified this process right down to the click of a button. As

such, social media is a Web 2.0 innovation not only because it encourages user-generated

content, but also because it extends the focus to the users by allowing them to curate or select

other content to share among their networks. Web 2.0 was first and social media has grown out

of Web 2.0 and the creation of the user-generated web. You can refer to social media as a Web

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2.0 innovation but referring to Web 2.0 as social media is incorrect because it ignores all its

fewer social aspects, such as blogs, YouTube and so on. Therefore, the emergence of social

media was made possible by the contributions (features, and other innovations) of Web 2.0.

It will also be noted that Web 2.0 does not refer to any specific technical upgrades to the internet.

It simply refers to a shift in how the internet is used in the 21st century. In the new age, there is a

higher level of information sharing and interconnectedness among participants. For example,

Web 2.0 came with certain features like HTML, CSS, which allows individuals to design

websites on their own without necessarily relying on bots as it was in Web 1.0. These features,

therefore helped the likes of Mark Zukerberg, Jack Bawal, and others to apply the sense of

coding, both in App creation and websites creation, which then led to the emergence of

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp and now the most recent, TikTok (Yasar, 2023).

This new version allows users to actively participate in the experience rather than just acting as

passive viewers who take in information. As the Internet has become a more interactive medium,

a new term has come into use to describe it: Web 2.0. This new version of the Internet gives web

users the opportunity to generate content and connect with other users. Many sites that fit the

Web 2.0 model are developed through an interactive community of users. Prominent examples

include Wikipedia, Facebook and Second Life. What Web 2.0 tools have in common is the

ability to aggregate knowledge and overcome the limitations of borders and space in social

media. Most of the technologies used to deliver Web 2.0 are rich web technologies, such as

Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and JavaScript, in addition to Ajax, RSS and Eclipse. Web

2.0 applications are often based on the decentralized download methodology that made

BitTorrent so successful, in which each downloader of content is also a server, sharing the

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workload and making heavily demanded content more accessible than it would be in the

centralized model, where demand can lead to overwhelmed servers and pages (Yasar, 2023).

Web 2.0 and its features such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, CSS, HTML and JavaScript,

equipped individuals, businesses and even organisations to design their Apps and websites

separately. These apps and websites can be further linked to social media networking sites with

icons on their platforms, where visitors to these personal and corporate websites are further

moved from home pages to different social media sites and same thing happens in reverse order.

One could assume that the whole idea of Web 2.0 is social media emergence.

Conclusion
Web 2.0 is not a cure-all for development problems, nor will it have a use in every project. But it

is an exciting and flexible resource that should be added to any development practitioner's

toolbox. However, it should also be noted that Web 2.0 contributed to the emergence of social

media platforms. In the past, audience was passive and communication on the Internet was one-

way. But since its invention in late 1990’s, Web 2.0 gave Internet usage another face. That is,

with certain features like Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, CSS, HTML and JavaScript (which

are all user-generated and interactive), founders of social media platforms used these features to

advance the design of their social media networking sites, which till today, has enhanced the way

and manner we use the internet for personal and business purposes.

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