Up close and participatory

Gosh, doesn't there seem to be a lot of hand-wringing and prognostication these days about the traditional and new media? Reminds me a little of the flurry about "convergence" a couple of years back (don't hear much about that, now).

Nevertheless, there are sometimes good sources for the discussion and the Economist is one of those. It has produced a special report that says we are already in an age of personal and participatory media.It points out that a lot of the assumptions about what would happen have turned out to be wrong (natch).

For instance, major corporations built huge "pipes" down which to push information and products from themselves and their partners, only to find that half the capacity is being taken up by information coming the other way, in the form of such things as blogs and chat.

"Even today, [these big guys] can barely conceive of a scenario in which users might put as much into the network as they take out, said the magazine's writer, Andreas Kluth.