It seems to me that life has gotten to the point where the effects of the Internet are now becoming broadly social enough that there is a general awareness. Internet isn't a decoration on contemporary society, it's a challenge to it. The society that has an Internet is a different kind of society. What we've got here is a network that is natively good at group forming. The change in our historical generation: group action just got easier. This isn't just a new way of broadcasting, it isn't just a new way of having a two-way conversation. It actually engages groups. E-mailing is a special file transfer program and the big thing was the reply-all button. That's the first time where anybody is included into the social group. Making a group conversation is as easy as clicking a button. Now when anybody creates an outbound message, it is implicitly in the power of anyone in that group to make it a group conversation. The first social feature, but not the best because of spam. There's a ladder of sharing, conversations, collaborations, and collective action. You can discover who you have in common interests with, but only after you do your own work. There's a Mermaid Parade in Conney Island, and the photographers who were in it weren't coordinated in advanced. They discovered one another on their own, and started riffing on one another's work because they already identified one another as a shared thing. Sharing is a platform and is changing the media world. Every URL is a community; Flickr is a world of sharing and conversation. People come together and get better at something, and the group gets better together.
Clay Shirkey, Here Comes Everybody