It's not exactly a systematised model and it actually predates Web 2.0 but the best example I have seen of an 'architecture' emerging for this is that of a young functionally illiterate Aboriginal boy in Western Australia using high-end Macs and GIS software to piece together the story of his people, his family, and his version of the Aboriginal 'Dreaming' (their foundation myth and law). Here's the relevant excerpted section from my book 'Towards Cultural Citizenship: tools for cultural policy and human development' (2002):

'Cameo 1: Australia

The place is Geraldton, in the central region of Western Australia, about an hour’s flight north of Perth. A small coastal town with a declining rural industrial base, some remarkable built heritage and a fairly sizeable Aboriginal population largely displaced from their traditional rural homelands.

[...]

I walk into a place called the Yamaji Language Centre – an organisation funded by the Australian federal government to provide skill development opportunities for the local Aboriginal population (Yamaji is the dominant language, family and skin-group – or ‘mob’ as they say – in this part of WA). In this centre – a little air-conditioned oasis of high technology and young people – there are several high end and multimedia-capable computers. One of these is being used by a young Aboriginal boy, perhaps 14 or 15 years old. He is using Geographical Information System (GIS) software combined with multimedia authoring and visualisation packages to both discover and reconstruct the language, culture, families and social memories of his own tribal group. Using GIS he can zoom in on his geographical region on a digital map and by clicking a few times can call up recorded fragments of a lost language, scanned pictures of elders and family members, anthropological accounts of the white ‘discovery’ of his people, tribal and clan boundaries, secret and sacred sites and his natural and cultural heritage.

The boy should be at school but he doesn’t like it much. His reading and writing skills are not too good and the curriculum and teachers are not helping them to get any better. But he’s very good at the non-linear, interactive, spatial and often intuitive ‘linkage’ skills that are needed for the new media.

These, after all, are precisely the skills developed in understanding the indigenous Dreaming (the foundation law or ‘myth’ that informs Aboriginal societies) in understanding the nature of Songlines. These are the conceptual and cognitive ‘mapping’ skills of a non-print culture – skills that those trained exclusively in a print culture have forgotten or never acquired.

[...]

The Yamaji boy was practising digital convergence, albeit undoubtedly without knowing or caring about it in those terms. He was using the resources of three converging industry sectors – computing, com- munications and content – in order to reconstruct the layers of combined narratives that, in their ensemble, his peers and elders had never seen.

Positioning himself precariously, and certainly temporarily, within what Manuel Castells has called the ‘global space of flows’, this young Aborigine was using some of the newest technologies in the world in order to find a way of locating parts of the oldest continuous civilisation in the world in its place and for others potentially to witness.

At the same time, the Yamaji boy was, however informally, an ‘apprentice’ in the creative industries if we take the definition of these as ‘... those activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’. (DCMS, 1998:003) He was doing creative industries work.

Finally, the Yamaji boy was engaged in the work of elaboration and representation of a complex network of forms of affiliation and communication, of reciprocity and interdependency, that can prop- erly be called civil society both in the sense of a community of citizens and the sense of a public sphere in which the networks of relations and dependencies between citizens can be constructed, elaborated and consolidated through ‘stories’. This is an example of what Arjun Appadurai calls ‘... the micronarratives of film, television, music, and other expressive forms which allow modernity to be rewritten more as vernacular globalization and less as a concession to large-scale national and international policies’ (Appadurai, 1996:10). The Yamaji boy was doing civil society in this sense.'

I continue to believe that the newest technologies in the world still have a lot more to learn from its oldest civilisation!

Colin that is a very refreshing take on the subject. This has widened the scope of study in the field of new media. Do you think that classical communication models like Shannon and Weaver's Model and Osgood-Schramm Model are not applicable while theorizing the emerging developments mediated by new communication technologies?

Thanks Soumya, but I'm afraid I'm not a communications models specialist and my work is more in the field of cultural policy, cultural anthropology, and cultural history combined with a strong interest in 'cultural technologies' of print cultures, writing, the book, etc., and their social, cultural and political effects. Hence my interest in the effects of this new digital revolution on cultures old and new. It seems clear to me however that both the 'pre-literate' cultures of very young children, and the oral, non-print based cultures of traditional societies like the Australian Aborigines have a great deal to teach us in their non-linear, paradigmatic, and associative 'layered' approach to meanings and stories in which 'layered' software like GIS and other topopgraphical systems may prove to be eventually very useful.

Colin thanks to you too for your interesting insight on the subject from a different perspective. It will add up to the evolving knowledge about new communication technologies. Cultural anthropology can make the understanding of the subject even better.

i suggest the Mcluhan theories and any dialogic model

Florence thanks for your interest in the topic. You are putting some importance to old communication models which makes the debate wider.

Esther can you be specific on which theories of McLuhan to concentrate? By Dialogue Model I guess you are suggesting participatory communication model which Florence is also suggesting. Thanks for your interest.

I probably should start of by saying that my knowledge in communication models is quite limited.

I'd guess the first choice here is how you like to approach media in general. Many communication models seem to be based on the assumption that media are simply a vessel for content and then emphasize this content as in "What is transmitted?". Marshall McLuhan had a different approach in emphasizing the form or structure of media rather than the content. You can find many clips on YouTube where he explains this notion (to get you started), the primary source of McLuhan's media theory would be his book "Understanding Media". It then depends heavily on the kind of services you want to look at on the Internet as all kinds of communication (one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many) are possible to various degrees. McLuhan basically says that electronic media extends all senses equally by extending the central nervous system (unlike the book that emphasizes the eye e.g.). Compared to the uniform and specialised society created by the book, electric/electronic lead to an implosion, a more integrated but diverse, non-specialist and decentralized society resembling the oral cultures that existed before the alphabet and the book (he calls it the global village). So I guess he wouldn't be surprised that non-literate cultures embrace the new media quite differently then literate societies, which the first example illustrates quite well.

There is no ideal. Multi-modal streams of communication using ICT on mobile devices are now the most popular. Reaching and engaging students and others means being on many different modes.

Traditional models are the basis for the deepening and development of architecture and design communication. Historically, models have been a growing complexity, from simple Aristotelian proposed sender-message-receiver until Recent classic and include functions (Lazarfeld), processes (Schramm), evaluation (Berelson), purpose (Berlo), planes ( Moles), semantics (Eco-Barthes), power (Wulf, Pasquale, Ezensberger), alienation, fetishism (Morin, Mattelard), a process correlated with the progress of scientific and technological productive forces. As the way people work and function is altered when new tools are used, communication models have been adapted to the new instruments, one of which is today's Web 2.0, tool that teaches us that it is not possible personally experience and acquire the information we need to act, reason that store knowledge in networks present or mediated. This form, forces us to navigate and recognize patterns hidden in the network, experiencing the idea of ​​chaos, which, as a science, recognizes the connection of everything with everything. The ability to communicate between sources of information, to create useful information patterns is essential in the knowledge society. A modern communications model should consider networks, defined as connections between entities (computers, electrical power grids or people), work on the principle that individuals, groups, systems, nodes can be connected to create an integrated whole, and that an alteration in the network has a ripple effect on the whole. Albert-László Barabási states that "nodes always compete for connections because links represent survival in an interconnected world" (2002, p.106). The nodes that become more presence are more successful in acquiring additional connections. The nodes (be fields, ideas, communities) that specialize and gain recognition for their expertise are more opportunities for recognition and effective communication. I recommend you see the paper of George Siemens, Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age and draw conclusions for an answer to your question.

Jens, thanks for your interest in the topic. You have put forward some interesting observations which will add up to the volume of knowledge in this area.

Marco, a refreshing take on the topic. You are spot on. We need something that moves beyond these classical models in a changed environment.

Beth, you are correct when you observe that there is no one single approach to define such a multifaceted communication medium. However, let us hope for a time when we move towards a model which takes in its ambit the dynamics involved.

Roberto, I will surely go through the paper that you have recommended. You have vouchsafed for a network oriented model which helps while theorizing a possible model for web 2.0

I agree with Beth to have multi modal streams. I am also struggling with the same. As such, you might be interested in looking at technology acceptance model, theory of planned behaviour and other acceptance of technology theories.

You may look at memetics. Certain messages are shared widely on the social media while other are not. For example, a completely unknown singer can get millions of fans in a few weeks if people share his/her youtube video. Memetics is a discipline which looks at the characteristics of messages that are highly shared versus those that are not.

Unfortunately, the science of memetics is not very developed and the "journal of memetics" has stopped. The reason for this is, I think, that people have tried to put too much precision into the concept and define memes as indivisible information units like genes. Memes are more fluid and difficult to put into mathematical models. Nevertheless, memetics has been applied very successfully in so called "viral marketing".

Hi Agner, Souyma

Re: Memetics, see what you think of this

http://storyality.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/storyality-100-the-holonic-structure-of-the-meme-the-unit-of-culture/

Best

JT