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A quick glimpse of the table confirms our prediction that Japanese people would prefer to discuss or voice their opinions when there is a lack of identifiability. The US Slashdot has a much lower rate of anonymous cowards, indicating a preference to be identifiable. For the most active topics, 25% of comments on average were made as anonymous coward in the US, compared to 69% in Japan.

Due to the industrialization and modernization of the past several decades, changes in social and economic structure have inevitably caused East Asian countries, such as Japan and Korea, to become more westernized. Due to this fact, some argue that Japan should not be considered as an exemplar of collectivistic societies (Takano and Osaka 1999). Yet the striking cultural differences, in the normative degree of anonymity, found in this study suggests that there continues to be a difference between Eastern and Western cultures in how people are motivated to seek and interact with others online.

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.

this new library – at least seven million volumes – has become available everywhere. The library has become coextensive with the Internet.

What does this mean for the library as we have known it? Has Google suddenly obsolesced the idea of a library as a building stuffed with books?

Google seems to have abandoned – or ignored – library science in its own book project.

In fact, because the library is universal, library science now needs to be a universal skill set, more broadly taught than at any time previous to this.

we are rapidly becoming a data-generating species.

In order to have a connection to our data selves of the past, we are all going to need to become library scientists.