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The Cairo News Company, which provided satellite services and equipment for Al Jazeera, the BBC and CNN, was raided by police after it transmitted footage of the food riots.

But new media applications were changing the rules. This was demonstrated by the arrest of a journalism student from Berkeley named James Karl Buck, who was detained along with his Egyptian interpreter as he photographed a street protest. Buck used the Twitter application on his cell phone to send a snapshot of himself and the text message “arrested” to a list serve of his contacts. His friends used the message to prompt intervention from Berkeley and the U.S. consulate. Buck was soon able to Twitter the word “free,” and mounted an online campaign to release his interpreter.

police finally located him and tortured him for his Facebook password and names of the other group members (the vast majority of which he didn’t know).

Media literacy is the capacity to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms.

Like literacy in general, media literacy is applied in a wide variety of contexts—when watching television or reading newspapers, for example, or when posting commentary to a blog. Indeed, media literacy is implicated everywhere one encounters information and entertainment content.

The foundation of effective media analysis is the recognition that: • all media messages are constructed • each medium has different characteristics and strengths and a unique language of construction • media messages are produced for particular purposes • all media messages contain embedded values and points of view • people use their individual skills, beliefs, and experiences to construct their own meanings from media messages • media and media messages can influence beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, and the democratic process Making media and sharing it with listeners, readers, and viewers is essential to the development of critical thinking and communication skills. Feedback deepens reflection on one’s own editorial and creative choices and helps students grasp the power of communication.

Though I was privileged to lead the effort that gave rise to the Web in the mid-1990s, it has long passed the point of being something designed by a single person or even a single organization. It has become a public resource upon which many individuals, communities, companies and governments depend. And, from its beginning, it is a medium that has been created and sustained by the cooperative efforts of people all over the world.

The Internet is a far more speech-enhancing medium than print, the village green, or the mails.... The Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation.

Mr. Greenwald’s McCain videos, most of which portray the senator as contradicting himself in different settings, have been viewed more than five million times — more than Mr. McCain’s own campaign videos have been downloaded on YouTube.

Mr. Greenwald shows how technology has dispersed the power to shape campaign narratives, potentially upending the way American presidential campaigns are fought.

But in the 2008 race, the first in which campaigns are feeling the full force of the changes wrought by the Web, the most attention-grabbing attacks are increasingly coming from people outside the political world. In some cases they are amateurs operating with nothing but passion, a computer and a YouTube account, in other cases sophisticated media types with more elaborate resources but no campaign experience.