The Internet, the telephone and utopian peer production
Can we substitute "the Internet" for another technology see similar trends? It's funny--many people brought up the same question in my workshop yesterday. Looking at the Internet only as a medium for interpersonal communication, a la Nancy Baym, you can certainly say that there were similar social reactions. In the early nineties many commentators wondered whether the Internet would fragment communities and break down important/useful social barriers. Sounds very much like Fischer to me. However, the Internet is not only an interpersonal medium. It can be one-to-many and many-to-many. It's a place to actually produce valuable things, as Benkler says. That makes it very different from the phone.
I wonder if we are living through the utopian days of peer production (or user-generated content, as most CHI folks call it). I certainly see the utopian view floating around here. However, the other day I heard some (certainly non-definitive) statistics on the usage of Flickr. The stats said that less than half a percent of the Flickr users actually upload content. The rest only view photos. That aligns with my hunches about peer production. Yes, we have lowered the bar, making it easier for more people to create content and things of value on the web. However, I fear that we just have just created a new cultural elite: the people who are brave and educated enough to post their creations on the web.