You send messages out to a large community of listeners. It s pretty difficult for them to send messages back. On the Internet the speaker and the listener are pretty much equivalent. They re actually interacting on an equal basis. What s even more scary to the central powers is you may speak and the listeners will communicate with one another, and they ll bypass the center, so that the ability to speak and be heard kind of get sucked out and more individuals have more power to speak, to talk back, and to bypass you.
Same thing happens to big business, obviously.
Companies that are used to sending out PR messages get very disconcerted when their customers talk about them to one another and bypass them, and, of course, the same thing happens to government. Interestingly enough, the nonprofit world, you think, will grow from this, the nonprofit institutions will have more authority because they ll be able to communicate, I guess, more easily across national boundaries. What s really happening is over the last hundred years it s been a huge advantage to have economies of scale. The bigger you got, the more efficient you could get, the more power you had. And now the economies of scale are gone.