The internet has leveled the playing field. No one can tell you that you can’t record and sell a song or write a short story anymore. You don’t need editors, agents, and gatekeepers. The internet is the new democracy. It’s broken down the walls and bridged the oceans, so different cultures share their ideas good and bad. Change is lightening fast, so what some would call and underground movement may actually be bigger than any government or corporation wants to admit.
Let’s start with creativity. Once upon a time, the only way a musician or writer could sell his goods was to find an agent who could get him signed with a record label or publisher. Those organizations decided what the public wanted to hear. Internet entities, like Napster, and online retail outlets, like CD Baby, changed that edict forever. Now the public decided what they wanted to hear, and the record labels came tumbling down. Today, writers can easily self publish on the internet and sell their stories on independent internet publishing sites. In fact, anyone with a little web building skill can create his own website and have total control over its content. The public can freely choose to visit the site or not.
Through Facebook and MySpace and YouTube, people from different political cultures can connect immediately and share ideas. Totalitarian countries recognize the danger in this, so sometimes, their only defense is to disable the internet. However, technology has made it pretty easy to get around the sternest government.
When people are giving a forum that allows free and open sharing, they’ll start to balance the cultural and political atmosphere around them and throughout the world. Therefore, the internet is really only dangerous to the people in power.