My approach to this issue is to try to break free of either/or thinking about whether Web 2.0 is good or bad for society and/or education and focus on context of use and conditions of value. Such an ecological approach considers how the affordances of a particular medium might help people achieve specific purposes or address particular pedagogical goals under certain circumstances, while also considering its limitations. For example, if people understand how to conduct an efficient web search and evaluate the reliability of sources, then the benefits of having access to the thoughts, ideas, and creative achievements of millions of newly self-published authors may outweigh the challenges of sifting through them to find the worthiest ones. And the potential benefits of being able to interact so easily with people and their ideas without restrictions on time or distance are enormous.

The social web can offer a great deal of value as a learning environment, under the right conditions. Web 2.0 media such as blogs, wikis, and threaded discussions can help developing writers build a sense of audience and purpose as they interact in writing with others around their ideas. In the context of effective instruction, this sort of authentic written communication can potentially help students learn how to write better than typical classroom composition activities in which the sole purpose of writing is to prove competence to a teacher. However, Web 2.0 media do not inherently provide instruction; in order to achieve such results, teachers need to guide students toward learning the rhetoric and applying the conventions of academic discourse, with clear expectations and reliable accountability mechanisms. They also need to provide writing tasks and prompts that engage students in genuine authorship involving critical and creative thinking about substantive issues, works of literature or art, or other meaningful content that has relevance to students and to society at large. Discussing the value of Web 2.0 for authors as well as audiences, considering both challenges and opportunities, essentially reframes the debate about Keen’s polemical argument. Rather than listing “why we like (or do not like) the social web,” it might be even more compelling to explain “when we like the social web and why.”