homes and classrooms as well. Online communication tools put students in touch with distant family members, practicing experts, and their peers, wherever they may be located. Desktop videoconferencing, instant messaging services, microblogging platforms, and voice-over-IP clients facilitate connections and the dissemination of information between and among students and teachers, keeping classroom communities in touch with each other on a more extensive basis than ever before.

As more professionals work from remote or distributed locations, the need for cheap, flexible communication tools has grown.

Desktop videoconferencing, instant messaging services, microblogging platforms, and voice-over-IP clients facilitate connections and the dissemination of information between and among students and teachers, keeping classroom communities in touch with each other on a more extensive basis than ever before.

s participation becomes easier, the diversity of voices that can be heard also increases. At one time only a few mass media giants controlled most of the information that flowed into the homes of the public, but with the advance of technology even a single person has the ability to spread information around the world. The diversification of media has benefits because in cases where the control of media becomes concentrated it gives those who have control the ability to influence the opinions and information that flows to the public domain.[8] Media concentration provides opportunity for corruption, but as information continues to become accessed from more and more places it becomes increasingly difficult to control the flow of information to the will of an agenda. Participatory Culture is also seen as a more democratic form of communication as it stimulates the audience to take an active part because they can help shape the flow of ideas across media formats.[8] The democratic tendency lent to communication by participatory culture allows new models of production that are not based on a hierarchical standard. In the face of increased participation, the traditional hierarchies will not disappear, but "Community, collaboration, and self-organization" can become the foundation of corporations as powerful alternatives.[9] Although there may be no real hierarchy evident in many collaborative websites, their ability to form large pools of collective intelligence is not compromised.

Participatory culture is a neologism in reference of, but opposite to a Consumer culture — in other words a culture in which private persons (the public) do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers (prosumers). The term is most often applied to the production or creation of some type of published media. Recent advances in technologies (mostly personal computers and the Internet) have enabled private persons to create and publish such media, usually through the Internet. This new culture as it relates to the internet has been described as Web 2.0.

Rheingold argues, a handful of generally privileged, generally wealthy people controlled nearly all forms of mass communication--newspapers, television, magazines, books and encyclopedias.