What we are doing is blurring the distinction between reading and writing...
That's part of it. What we're really doing is allowing anyone and everyone to participate in ways that weren't even imaginable when I was a lad.
Personal computing and the internet are as radical a technological development as the printing press.
When I was young, information flowed downhill. Somebody wrote a book or a newspaper or magazine article. The library had it or could get it. I could slap down my card and borrow it. It might take the author weeks, months, or years to produce the original information, and years more often passed between publication and my finding it. How to find it? Start with the library card catalogue for books, and magazine indices for articles. I knew plenty of kids in high school who had no idea how to look for, still less find things. They were up the creek. If I happened to disagree with something in the piece or felt it was of great value, I was free to write my own piece and reference it. I could even write to the author in care of the publisher. In fact, I did so a few time; in further point of fact, I never once heard back from anyone I wrote to that way.
When the news came on the idiot box every weekday evening, we were free to watch it or not. We could comment upon it among ourselves, but to the best of our knowledge, it was the news. Same with the local news on the radio every hour on the hour, brought to you by something or other. It just was. Nobody's opinion was solicited. Obviously, people could write to T.V. stations, but so what? Obviously, we could write letters to the editor of the local fish wrapper, but again, so what?
Information still flows downhill in many respects, but it no longer stops there. Anybody in the United States with $500 and a telephone line can find any piece of any information anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes, and actively particpate in the world's events instead of merely passively watching and reading edited accounts of them.
To the best of my knowledge, neither of my parents ever wrote to an elected misrepresentative. I do it all the time in mere minutesand I get responses, too. When I wanted to buy a Smith & Wesson model 29 in the boonies of northern Michigan in the late 1970s, I was up the creek: no matter how many gun shops I drove to in however many towns, there weren't any. Today, all I have to do is visit some web sites, make some telephone calls, and send the cashier's check.
If wikis cut down on the raw quantity of E-mail, so much the better; their real value, however, is that they enable more people to participate in more information sharing and decision making processes. Top-down expertise carries less weight. Lateral thinking and organization are moving forward so fast, the leftist extremists will never know what happened. China is struggling in vain to censor its subjects' internet use. Representatives of the Democratic (sic) party have figured out how to raise money over the internet, to be sure, but all the lateral conversations we have these days just make it harder and harder to tell lies.
It's a whole new world.