I was searching this morning for web 1.0 ressources in French. It was interesting to see the amount of belittleing phrases, from "passive web" through "documentary web", "Spectator web", etc.
Web 2.0 is referred to as the "social web", where large companies found how to make money from this thing through centralisation, javascript, social networks, online sales, and the massive use of berries. The descriptions of Web 3.0 and 4.0 are so full of bullshit, acronyms, marketing speak, and futurism, it's not worth commenting on.
Berries? you might ask.
Human evolution has included colour sight to enable the picking of ripe fruit and avoidance of dangerous meats or insects.
Icons tap into this evolutionary advantage. Images that target our attention in order to vehicule an emotional response are another. Their use sometimes has the side effect of manipulating you, the reader. Today they are also used to track you or vehicule code.
The current web plunges the reader in a (sometimes pretty) morass of background images, icons, adverts, gadgets, etc. that distract you from noticing that perhaps there's not much actual content.
It also slows web sites dramatically. Try looking at most recipe web sites for an example. Now visit Luke Smith's Based Cooking (He had a rant about this a while back)
Scrolling through Facebook's litany of meme's, repeated jokes, and plain rubbish, will also make you realise that there's very little content. What remains, is formatted and presented in an identical fashion, much like visiting adjacent prison cells. It also dissapears quickly, buried under more meme's, repeated jokes, and rubbish. And while you are rotting your brain in this manner, you are being tracked mercilessly while your soul is sold for a few deniers.
In a nutshell, web 1.0 wasn't something to simply discard, and while technological advances are indiscutable, (UTF-8, CSS, backend scripting,..) the uses they have been put to sometimes definitely are.
I'm no monk: I still need to get to my bank, make the odd online purchase, etc. but I think it's possible to have in parallel a reasoned web simply by editing web sites responsably. Not by throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but eliminating the chaff, reducing the C02 footprint, reducing the illisibility, making it faster, making it easier for people with reduced sight to enjoy the content, making sure it can be read in all browsers, stop tracking in it's... tracks, and getting to the point.
How about calling it Web 1.5 ?