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businesses can learn from young people who create their own sites.

Social media can be used to create word-of-mouth advocacy for products or services,

real estate agents, for instance, are using Web sites that include reviews from clients after their homes have been sold.

genuine conversation with their audience,

Marhshall McLuhan argued that in each socio-cultural era the medium in which information is created and transmitted determines the essential characteristics of that culture. He also predicted the evolution of an interconnected "global village".  The shift from a centralized media industry modeled on industrial revolution structures to a decentralized chaotic information-age soup is having a profound effect on the messages we exchange and shaping the characteristics of our culture. The global village comes to a crescendo with podcasting, and you can participate in the revolution with tools that are easily within reach: your imagination, the computer you're using to read this web page, and a video camera. We're not going to predicting what's next, as that's going to depend on what you, yes you, plan to do with new media. If the flutter of one butterfly wing, can trigger a chain reaction of events resulting in a storm half-way across the planet, imagine the effect millions, or billions, of individually produced videos will have on the characteristic of the global village and the media landscape.

You don't even need a video camera to start videoblogging, the mashup culture is in full force

most new computers come with free video editing software

A large group of vloggers, over 2,000 at last count, actively participate in the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group from all over the world.

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.