The "-ing" of Web 2.0: How users defined the social media era

Excavating the Vernacular: Beyond the Blueprints

An era's true story rarely appears in official blueprints or polished corporate histories. Authentic history scatters itself in the margins. We find it etched into worn pathways and embedded in shared jokes, invented slang, and emergent rituals. Understanding the social web—that transformative period retroactively labeled "Web 2.0"—requires scholars to look past user interfaces and optimistic mission statements. The platform builders filed their patents, but users created the culture.

The genuine history of that time resists capture by sanitized platform verbs like connect, share, and discover. Instead, it fossilizes within the vernacular language users created. This language described what they actually did, felt, and experienced within structured spaces.

Digital archaeology proposes a central thesis. The most enduring landmarks of the social web are not platform nouns like Facebook or Twitter. Users' verbs matter more, particularly the gerunds—the "-ings"—that captured the lived reality of digital sociality. Users forged these words, often unconsciously, to make sense of new ways of being together and apart.

The Architecture vs. The Artifact: Platform Stage, User Play

Web 2.0 represented a fundamental shift in digital life. The preceding era—the often-romanticized "hand-built web" of the late 1990s and early 2000s—sprawled as a decentralized frontier. Personal homepages dominated this landscape. These homepages declared sovereign identity, planting flags on self-claimed plots of cyberspace. "I am here," they announced, often with blinking GIFs and MIDI soundtracks.

Web 2.0 ushered in a different model. Sophisticated, centralized platforms like Facebook and Twitter emerged. These platforms resembled shared public squares rather than individual homesteads. Users no longer broadcast from their own digital land. They interacted within a shared context. Rules, norms, and algorithmic currents governed this new space. Digital life shifted its locus from personal domain to platform feed.

Platforms provided the stage and props, burying scripts deep within Terms of Service. Users improvised the play. Platforms engineered verbs into their interfaces, offering buttons labeled "Like," "Friend," and "Follow." Users collectively appropriated these actions. They interpreted, modified, and ritualized the buttons, imbuing them with complex social meaning beyond simple technical function. Through mass adoption and shared understanding, users transformed skeletal interface actions into intricate social rituals. These rituals performed identity and marked belonging or exclusion.

The gerund stands at the heart of this user-driven transformation. Adding "-ing" to a verb does more than denote ongoing action. In the social web context, it crystallized fleeting digital clicks into durable social phenomena. The "-ing" suffix encapsulated the entire scene: surrounding context, user intent, and complex human emotions.

Consider the difference:

• Like is a button—a binary input and data point for algorithms. Liking suggests nuanced social calculus: reciprocal obligations, performed appreciation, dopamine-driven validation, and feed politics.

• Friend is a database relationship that a request initiates. Friending, particularly in its early promiscuous phase on Facebook, signified a specific strategy. It performed popularity or awkwardly navigated real-world hierarchies translated online.

• Vote on platforms like Reddit is a simple binary choice. Downvoting indicates a collective mechanism of community justice and gatekeeping. This mechanism carries social implications and enables mob dynamics.

The "-ing" grants narrative weight and transforms sterile functions into lived experiences. It speaks the language of participation rather than instruction. The gerund signals that people do these things rather than merely following platform permissions.

Platforms owned the code, servers, venture capital, and data. Users owned something else. Through collective actions and coined language, they owned the "-ing." This ownership allowed them to write the real history of the era.

The "-ing" Artifacts: Excavating User-Defined Rituals

Digital archaeology excavates these linguistic artifacts. They function as the potsherds and cave paintings of the Web 2.0 era. They reveal far more about culture than official histories ever could. Each "-ing" encodes specific social practices, anxieties, or innovations.

The Accumulation and Curat-ing: friending.im & unfriending.im

The online "friend" concept was one of Web 2.0's most foundational innovations. Early platforms like Friendster and MySpace encouraged near-limitless accumulation. "Friending" became an almost competitive act that publicly performed social reach. Users often measured status, however superficially, by the number displayed on profiles.

This practice clashed with human social cognition. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed that humans have a cognitive limit to stable social relationships, typically around 150¹. Online platforms allowed users to list thousands of "friends." Studies consistently showed that actual interaction patterns revolved around much smaller core networks². These patterns echoed Dunbar's findings even in the digital realm.

The user-generated act of "unfriending" stepped into this tension. The New Oxford American Dictionary acknowledged its significance in 2009, naming "unfriend" its Word of the Year³. This choice marked a cultural moment when digital social lives began carrying real-world weight. The verb "unfriend" remains a sterile database entry—the severing of a digital link. The gerund "unfriending" captures the human drama.

"Unfriending" speaks to process and deliberation. It captures the quiet anxiety before the click and the potential for real-world confrontation. It signifies the necessary, often uncomfortable act of social curation. Platform architecture initially pushed for infinite accumulation. "Unfriending" became the user-carved desire path reflecting fundamental human needs for boundaries and separation. Users needed to maintain meaningful social circles. This gerund stands as a digital landmark to letting go—to defining who isn't in your circle as much as who is. Users appropriated the "unfriend" button to manage the overwhelming scale of platform-mediated sociality.

The Economy of Approbat-ing: liking.im

No single button click embodies the Web 2.0 interface more than the "Like." Facebook introduced it in 2009, though variations existed earlier on sites like FriendFeed. It rapidly became the universal digital gesture of low-friction approval.

The act of Like quickly evolved beyond appreciation. It became the fundamental currency of the attention economy. For users, "liking" became a complex social signal: a nod of agreement, a marker of shared taste, or a reciprocal obligation. It maintained weak ties with minimal effort. Users also deployed it strategically to boost content visibility through algorithmic favor.

For platforms, "Liking" became the golden data point. Every click fed algorithms, refining user profiles and targeting advertisements. Platforms optimized feeds for maximum "engagement." The intermittent variable rewards of receiving "Likes" tapped into fundamental dopamine pathways⁴. This created feedback loops that encouraged compulsive checking and performative posting. The simple thumbs-up or heart icon embedded itself deeply in the neurological and economic infrastructure of the social web.

The gerund "liking" captures this entire ecosystem. It encompasses user social performance, platform data extraction, algorithmic manipulation, and neurochemical drivers. The gerund signifies more than the click. It represents the entire complex system of value exchange and validation-seeking that grew around that button. This artifact represents the gamification of social approval.

The Performance of Ident-ifying: retweeting.im & hashtagging.im

If "Liking" was about approval, other "-ings" were central to the performance of identity and the construction of shared meaning.

A "retweet" (later rebranded simply "Post" on X) technically functions as content amplification. "Retweeting" evolved into something more complex. It performed identity, allegiance, and intellectual positioning within Twitter's fast-flowing conversational stream. In the public theater of the timeline, "retweeting" became a powerful way to signal values and affiliations without authoring original words. It functioned as:

• An earnest endorsement ("I agree with this").

• An act of amplification or protest ("This needs to be seen").

• A tribal marker ("I belong to the group that shares this").

• Even, ironically, a form of condemnation ("Look at how wrong this is").

Data consistently indicated that retweets constituted a significant portion of content shared on Twitter⁵. This underscored its importance as a primary mode of expression rather than secondary action. Scholars like MIT's Sherry Turkle documented this performative aspect of online life extensively. She observed a cultural shift "from conversation to connection"—a move toward weaker ties and idealized self-performance through curated updates⁶. "Retweeting" serves as a primary tool in that ongoing performance. The gerund captures motive and social context rather than mere technical mechanism.

The humble "#" symbol originated in technical contexts. User Chris Messina famously proposed it in 2007 as a way to group conversations on Twitter⁷. Platforms eventually integrated the "hashtag" as a core feature for categorization. The user practice of "hashtagging" took on its own life. It became:

• A tool for joining larger conversations (#climatechange).

• A way to add ironic commentary or meta-narrative (#sorrynotsorry).

• A method for building community around niche interests (#bookstagram).

• A performative act of aligning oneself with movements or trends (#BlackLivesMatter).

"Hashtagging" transformed from simple indexing into a rich, user-driven system. It enabled folksonomy, commentary, and identity signaling. The "-ing" signifies the active ways users repurposed a technical feature for complex social ends. They exceeded the platform's original design.

The Gaze of Participat-ing (or Not): lurking.im & selfieing.im

Not all significant "-ings" involved active contribution. To "lurk" implies a passive state that observers often view negatively. "Lurking" represents the primary mode of engagement for the vast, silent majority. This majority powers the entire attention economy. The "1% rule" (or the 90-9-1 rule) of internet culture explains this behavior. It posits that only a tiny fraction of users actively create content in most online communities. A slightly larger group interacts through liking or commenting. The overwhelming majority simply consumes⁸. Decades of research, including consistent findings from Pew Research Center, confirm that a minority of users produce the vast majority of content on major platforms⁹. Passive consumption remains the default mode.

"Lurking" functions as the secret, often unacknowledged engine of the social web. Millions of silent page views and scrolls drive advertising revenue cumulatively. They shape algorithmic trends and provide audiences for active participants. Yet "lurking" remains largely invisible in the "engagement" metrics that platforms prioritize. The gerund "lurking" makes invisible action visible. It names and acknowledges the power of silent attention. This quiet artifact represents the unseen foundation upon which the entire edifice of the social web was built.

The hyper-visible act of "selfieing" lies at the opposite end of the spectrum. The "selfie"—a self-portrait photograph typically taken with a smartphone held at arm's length or via mirror—became a defining visual artifact of the mobile social era. Self-portraiture is ancient. The ease, immediacy, and networked distribution of smartphones and platforms like Instagram transformed it into ubiquitous social practice.

"Selfieing" exceeds mere picture-taking. It encompasses the entire ritual: composing, capturing, filtering, captioning, and sharing one's image for public consumption. It became a primary tool for identity construction in the visual economy of Web 2.0. Users deployed it as:

• Self-expression and creativity.

• Experience documentation ("I was here").

• Validation-seeking and social approval.

• Personal brand management.

• Participation in visual trends and memes.

The rise of "selfieing" reflects broader cultural shifts toward visual communication and personal branding¹⁰. It demonstrates performance of self in networked publics. The "-ing" captures the ongoing, iterative process of crafting digital persona through the front-facing camera lens. It marks the moment when the self became the primary subject of networked visual culture.

The Language of Power and Anx-ing: shadowbanning.im & doomscrolling.im

Not all user-generated "-ings" described benign social rituals. Some emerged from friction and anxieties. Others revealed power dynamics inherent in platform ecosystems.

"Shadowbanning" exemplifies users creating language to define their own reality, often in opposition to platform narratives. The term "shadowban" rarely appears in official platform lexicons or help documents. "Shadowbanning" emerged as a powerful, community-born term. It captured the unsettling feeling that algorithms suppressed or hid one's content without notification or explanation¹¹. It describes the unnerving experience of posting into an apparent void. Content appears visible to you but potentially invisible or de-prioritized for the wider community. This fuels suspicions of opaque censorship.

The gerund here exceeds description. It accuses. It represents the language of users pushing back against unaccountable algorithmic authority. They created a shared vocabulary to articulate collective unease and perceived injustice. This linguistic landmark represents the ongoing struggle for transparency and due process within algorithmically governed spaces.

A more recent but equally potent artifact is doomscrolling. This term emerged during periods of intense global uncertainty like the COVID-19 pandemic. Doomscrolling captures a specific cultural anxiety of the hyper-connected news cycle¹². It refers to the compulsive habit of endlessly scrolling through feeds saturated with negative news, even when it harms mental well-being. Observers have aptly described it as "a modern prayer wheel of anxiety"¹³.

"Doomscrolling" highlights a dark paradox. The infinite, algorithmically curated feed exploits an innate human drive to seek information and gain control during uncertain times. Platform mechanics prioritize engagement, often fueled by negative emotions. This ultimately deepens powerlessness, anxiety, and exhaustion. This distinctly modern ritual was born from the collision of human psychology and platform architecture. It signifies the potential pathologies of living inside the infinite scroll.

The User-Written History: Why the "-ings" Endure

The great platforms that defined social web architecture—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit—are undeniably significant historical structures. They are the buildings and infrastructure. They function as stage sets. However, they are not, in themselves, the most revealing landmarks of the era's culture.

The true landmarks encode the lived experience of that time. They are often behaviors that emerged within, upon, and sometimes against that architecture. User-generated language of action represents the digital fossils of collective social evolution. This language includes gerunds, neologisms, and slang.

These "-ings" persist in the vocabulary, often long after the specific interfaces or platforms that birthed them have changed or faded. Why? They encode social practice, human intention, and shared cultural meaning rather than mere lines of code or UI elements. They represent the moment when users collectively seized the provided tools and bent them to their own needs. In this process, they wrote their own history.

Studying these linguistic artifacts engages the core work of digital archaeology. It unearths the authentic, user-generated story of the "-ing of an Era." It listens to the echoes of how we navigated connection during the first great migration into networked sociality. We navigated identity, community, power, and anxiety. Understanding that past, etched into the language users created, yields invaluable insights. These insights enable building more intentional, human-centric digital spaces in the future. The Archive illuminates the path for the Anvil.