I was born in 1951. As a pre-teen and young teen it was a fairly common practice to write letters; I corresponded with people by mail. When I left home in 1969 to go to college, I still wrote letters to my Grandmother.
The point being that it was not that long ago that we saw the last vestiges of a read-write culture that flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries. People read, they reflected on that, and then they wrote. And then other people read that, and so on, and so on. The pamphleteers allowed the discussions to go out beyond the salons.
Then bam! We hit the read-only culture – consumers consumed (read/watched/listened to) whatever the massive incumbents produced and both technology and laws conspired to protect that situation.
Larry Lessig is up in Cambridge, Mass. at the Wikimedia Foundation Conference this week and yesterday he was talking about this R/W and R/O culture concept (thanks to notes taken by David Weinberger).
Larry has important things to say about laws and technology in the fight to preserve or re-create a true R/W culture. But this is also fundamental to an emerging 21st century platform for finding solutions to the Philippine energy pricing problem I discussed yesterday.
That solution will, and must, get beyond the “salons” of Manila and Washington and include consumers, business, universities, and government entities throughout the Philippines – as both consumers and creators of the energy sector. And it might – just might – include pictures, video, and music in addition to words.
Update: Come to think of it, the Web 2.0 concept of “consumer as producer” may just end up having a whole lot more to do with solutions to our energy problem than policy formulation.