KingNils

To visit my girlfriend I have recently been spending a lot of time in Rome. So I also spent my last weekend in the eternal city and with fantastic sunny weather and 17 degrees Celsius we decided to visit Ostia Antica, an excavation site a bit outside of Rome. I can only recommend this trip, because it shows a large well-preserved ruin area in contrast to the mostly patchwork-style sites in Rome’s city center (which of course is still very impressive). Only in Ostia Antica one gets a close-up picture of the kind of lifestyle in the past and one gets a feeling of what it could have been like to walk through the streets of ancient Rome. Here, on a huge area one finds the ruins of the former port colony and the impressive remains of ancient architecture. But actually I don’t want to go much in detail about history.

What is more interesting here, is a train of through that arouse when we were standing infront of a huge thermal bath. There we heard another tourist talk about the characteristics of such bath facilities and she compared it to the modern internet. At first, this thought seemed a bit absurd to me, but the longer I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that she makes a point – for me, Web 2.0 is simply the continuation of an antique cultural accomplishment.

To follow this though one has to know some facts about the thermal baths in ancient Rome. These facilities were extremely spacious. The Thermae of Caracalla for instance could host 2000 people. It did not only offer bathing, it also contained large libraries, conference rooms and places for all kinds of service such as hair dressers. Possible activities were extremely manifold and usually directed towards entertainment or interaction (e.g. with friends or business partners). And last but not least – the entrance was for free. So to conclude, the thermae were a standard destination for various activities of an individual.

Therefore, I think that a comparison to today’s Web 2.0 is not that strange. The internet is for almost everybody accessible at low cost. It features a very broad usability for various purposes (private and professional) and is a basis for many different business models focussing on entertainment or services. The only thing that I am asking myself now is: what has happened in the meantime, allowing the negligence of such multifunctionality, establishing a focus on functionally separated areas (e.g. TV for entertainment, shopping centers for consumption, professional facilities for business relations). Here, technology seems to have found a way to return something very essential to people; something that had been more and more abandoned by a specializing economy. This tendency seems to prove that the internet and the simplification of matters through the Web 2.0 with its low transaction costs have vitiated the „Economies of Scale“-theorists for some branches.