I think it’s important to talk a bit about the terminology that I use on this site. If you’ve read my about page (or my blog’s tag line), you’ll notice that I talk about “anarchic technologies” or “anarchic apps”. To many people, any word with the stem anarch- invokes images of riots and general chaos. Poor anarchy. It’s such a misaligned word. In it’s most literal sense, anarchy means anti-hierarchy. It is the opposite of hierarchy. There’s nothing inherently scary about this definition. Alas, you won’t find the definition “anti-hierarchy” among the paragons of reference (e.g., Wikipedia and Dictionary.com). No, these sources mention it’s two most common definitions: chaos and lack of government. It seems that the politicians have completely co-opted the word. (I wonder how the Oxford English Dictionary defines it. It’s too bad that the OED isn’t free online.)
So, if you can get over the connotations of the word anarchy, you’ll be able to understand why I employ it (and its variants). “Anarchic technologies” is the term that I use to group several types of software that promote anti-hierarchy. The most common forms of anarchic technologies are wikis, blogs and social networks. Each of these help promote the idea that anyone can contribute meaningful content to humanity’s continual discourse. These software applications have philosophical underpinnings that are essentially anti-elitist.
There are many other terms that are related to (and more popular) than “anarchic technologies”. “Social software”, “Web 2.0″, and “Enterprise 2.0″ are among the more common words that sometimes refer to the same collection of technologies to which I apply my “anarchic apps”. Since these terms are more familiar and more comfortable for some people, and because I like to use synonyms, you’ll see me use these terms interchangeably. Hopefully, few of my readers will be confused by this.
