To look at it in terms of an economics argument, Clay Shirky, who has written Here Comes Everybody, says that revolution doesn't happen with new technology when it's exciting; revolution happens when the technology becomes boring, when it becomes everyday, and this is what we're seeing with the Web 2.0 world. He identifies it as an issue of cognitive surplus.
For example, sure, on the Internet ten million people are putting their baby pictures up on Facebook, and it's very mundane. But if 5% of that cognitive surplus is building something, it has revolutionary impact—for example, Wikipedia. Flickr has changed the photography industry completely just because there are ten million photos, and nine million might be bad, but one million are incredible. Then there are the genealogical records.
Shirky's saying that we're now on the verge of this sort of wiki building, of everybody building. There's no longer the “great man” or “great thinker” idea. He's saying that this is now going to be the industrial model for development, for research; that we're moving toward this kind of wiki online involvement of everybody in how they're using technologies. Five years ago, we couldn't have seen wiki doing what it has done.
Again, is there a role that we have to play as parliamentarians in order to facilitate what could become a very complex but very phenomenal innovative revolution?