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So much of what we take for granted as part of daily life online, from the BIND software that makes domain names work, to the Apache webserver that powers a sizable chunk of the world's websites, to the cheap Linux servers that Google stacks into its global datacloud, was created by volunteers who gave their creations away to make possible something larger−the Web as we know it.

Is it possible to understand exactly what it is about the web that makes Wikipedia, Linux, FightAIDS@Home, the Gutenberg Project and Creative Commons possible? And if so, can this theoretical knowledge be put to practical use?

"We must now turn our attention to building systems that support human sociality."

We must develop a participative pedagogy, assisted by digital media and networked publics, that focuses on catalyzing, inspiring, nourishing, facilitating, and guiding literacies essential to individual and collective life.

to humanize the use of instruments that might otherwise enable commodification, mechanization and dehumanization

By literacy, I mean, following on Neil Postman and others, the set of skills that enable individuals to encode and decode knowledge and power via speech, writing, printing and collective action, and which, when learned, introduce the individual to a community.

Printing did not cause democracy or science, but literate populations, enabled by the printing press, devised systems for citizen governance and collective knowledge creation. The Internet did not cause open source production, Wikipedia or emergent collective responses to natural disasters, but it made it possible for people to act together in new ways, with people they weren't able to organize action with before, in places and at paces for which collective action had never been possible.

If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty first century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates). For this reason, participatory media literacy is not another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers.

Like the early days of print, radio, and television, the present structure of the participatory media regime−the political, economic, social and cultural institutions that constrain and empower the way the new medium can be used, and which impose structures on flows of information and capital−is still unsettled. As legislative and regulatory battles, business competition, and social institutions vie to control the new regime, a potentially decisive and presently unknown variable is the degree and kind of public participation. Because the unique power of the new media regime is precisely its participatory potential, the number of people who participate in using it during its formative years, and the skill with which they attempt to take advantage of this potential, is particularly salient.

But in the United States, many would-be activists have been frustrated by the gap between an online click and concrete participation. Facebook groups and causes often swell, crest and dissipate without leaving a mark on the outside world. 

As of August 5, 2008, Facebook listed 484,137 members in the Egypt Network. The 6 April group was alive and well with 72,274 members (six of them new).

There are still important differences in the way content is generated as well. The print tradition of knowledge creation tends to require more research, reflection and refinement in the process of transforming an idea from impulse to public distribution. The online environment encourages instant, reflexive responses. So the Internet as we know it has two powerful functions: as conveyor of its own immediate data, and as an extraordinary portal to traditional repositories of knowledge: the published books, reports, journalism, legal briefs and scholarly articles.

The Arab world has had a fundamentally different relationship to print culture, and modern published resources are sorely lacking.