- It has a way of keeping the professional media providers and traditional publishers honest (as it buries their work in a landslide of user-produced content that forces all media consumers to think).
- It empowers the nonbranded and uncredentialed.
- It trains kids better for the "real world" than traditional education does.
- It exposes truth as well as evil for people to find and take action for and against.
- It is the place where our children - natural information "hunter-gatherers" that they are, as MIT's Henry Jenkins puts it in his book Convergence Culture - can dig around endlessly for the information they crave, and it's the place where we can help them approach it critically and intelligently.
- It's necessarily bringing ethics back into the public discussion and citizenship back into public school curricula (I think, I hope).
- It subverts false authority and secret power.
Now I have to email all my friends and get them to weigh in!
