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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.

He acknowledges that there has been growth in support groups, but he insists that these are concerned with their own members' psychological well-being rather than with any civic interests

The rise in volunteering among young people is just about the only data in Bowling Alone that provides a basis for hope about the future.

One reason for the decline in face-to-face sociability may be that Americans can now sustain relationships with people whom they do not regularly see face-to-face.

empowering a new generation of largely unregulated political warriors who can affect the campaign dialogue faster and with more impact than the traditional opposition research shops.

Dan Carol, a strategist for Mr. Obama who was one of the young bulls on Bill Clinton’s vaunted rapid response team in 1992. “There’s just a lot of people who at a very low cost can do this stuff and don’t need a memo from HQ.”

But as is often the case with such videos, how many of the viewers come to sneer rather than applaud is hard to tell.

A Pew Research Center report titled "Internet and Campaign 2008" found that 39 percent of voters watched campaign-related video online during the election cycle.

"Celeb," which compared Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

But Paris Hilton's response video quickly changed the tone of that discussion.

hire an Emmy-winning CNN producer to shape what the camp would post.

They even had camp manager David Plouffe—who likely took a page from Rick Davis's playbook—give strategy briefings by chatting into a webcam in his office and occasionally referring to a slide.

STIGMATIZED IDENTITIES McKenna & Bargh (1998) reasoned that people with stigmatized social identities (see Frable 1993, Jones et al. 1984), such as homosexuality or fringe political beliefs, should be motivated to join and participate in Internet groups devoted to that identity, because of the relative anonymity and thus safety of Internet (compared to face-to-face) participation and the scarcity of such groups in "real life." Moreover, because it is their only venue in which to share and discuss this aspect of their identity, membership in the group should be quite important to these people, and so the norms of such groups should exert a stronger than usual influence over members' behavior. This prediction was confirmed by an archival and observational study of the frequency with which stigmatized-group members posted messages to (i.e., participated in) the group: Unlike in other Internet groups, participation increased when there was positive feedback from the other group members and decreased following negative feedback (McKenna & Bargh 1998, Study 1).

ON-LINE SUPPORT In harmony with these conclusions, Davison et al. (2000) studied the provision and seeking of social support on-line by those with grave illnesses, and found that people used Internet support groups particularly for embarrassing, stigmatized illnesses such as AIDS and prostate cancer (and also, understandably, for those illnesses that limit mobility such as multiple sclerosis). The authors point out that because of the anxiety and uncertainty they are feeling, patients are highly motivated by social comparison needs to seek out others with the same illness (p. 213), but prefer to do this on-line when the illness is an embarrassing, disfiguring, or otherwise stigmatized one, because of the anonymity afforded by Internet groups (p. 215).

Accordingly, Kang (2000) has argued that one potential social benefit of the Internet is to disrupt the reflexive operation of racial stereotypes, as racial anonymity is much easier to maintain on-line than off-line. For example, studies have found that African Americans and Hispanics pay more than do white consumers for the same car, but these price differences disappear if the car is instead purchased on-line (Scott Morton et al. 2003).

Yet racism itself is socially stigmatized-especially when it comes to extreme forms such as advocacy of white supremacy and racial violence (see McKenna & Bargh 1998, Study 3). Thus the cloak of relative anonymity afforded by the Internet can also be used as a cover for racial hate groups, especially for those members who are concerned about public disapproval of their beliefs; hence today there are more than 3000 websites containing racial hatred, agendas for violence, and even bomb-making instructions (Lee & Leets 2002). Glaser et al. (2002) infiltrated such a group and provide telling examples of the support and encouragement given by group members to each other to act on their hatreds. All things considered, then, we don't know yet whether the overall effect of the Internet will be a positive or a negative one where racial and ethnic divisions are concerned.

People are not passively affected by technology, but actively shape its use and influence (Fischer 1992, Hughes & Hans 2001). The Internet has unique, even transformational qualities as a communication channel, including relative anonymity and the ability to easily link with others who have similar interests, values, and beliefs. Research has found that the relative anonymity aspect encourages self-expression, and the relative absence of physical and nonverbal interaction cues (e.g., attractiveness) facilitates the formation of relationships on other, deeper bases such as shared values and beliefs. At the same time, however, these "limited bandwidth" features of Internet communication also tend to leave a lot unsaid and unspecified, and open to inference and interpretation.

As Lea & Spears (1995) and O'Sullivan (1996) have noted, studying how relationships form and are maintained on the Internet brings into focus the implicit assumptions and biases of our traditional (face-to-face) relationship and communication research literatures (see Cathcart & Gumpert 1983)-most especially the assumptions that face-to-face interactions, physical proximity, and nonverbal communication are necessary and essential to the processes of relating to each other effectively. By providing an alternative interaction setting in which interactions and relationships play by somewhat different rules, and have somewhat different outcomes, the Internet sheds light on those aspects of face-to-face interaction that we may have missed all along. Tyler (2002), for example, reacting to the research findings on Internet interaction, wonders whether it is the presence of physical features that makes face-to-face interaction what it is, or is it instead the immediacy of responses (compared to e-mail)? That's a question we never knew to ask before.

Spears et al. (2002) contrasted the engineering model with the "social science" perspective on the Internet, which assumes instead that personal goals and needs are the sole determinant of its effects. [In the domain of communications research, Blumler & Katz's (1974) "uses and gratifications" theory is an influential version of this approach.] According to this viewpoint, the particular purposes of the individuals within the communication setting determine the outcome of the interaction, regardless of the particular features of the communication channel in which the interaction takes place.The third and most recent approach has been to focus on the interaction between features of the Internet communication setting and the particular goals and needs of the communicators, as well as the social context of the interaction setting (see Bargh 2002, McKenna & Bargh 2000, Spears et al. 2002). According to this perspective, the special qualities of Internet social interaction do have an impact on the interaction and its outcomes, but this effect can be quite different depending on the social context. With these three guiding models in mind, we turn to a review of the relevant research.