Democracy is the product of the media.
Look at Iran. The state does not support a free press. As the government clamps down democracy breaks out all over the place supported by twitter and other free communications media. We in the West may be stupid at times, but hooking humanity together with the Internet may have been the best thing we could have done to ensure lasting freedom for the individual.
The way to save the media from this implosion of free information abundance seems to be to start to value the input of the free media and that is pretty much what happens - the online blogger becomes part of the media.
But it is a slow process as the displacement of real journalists by opinionated people who do not do the leg work is NOT the media. Which is why twitter works so well, it employs the masses to do something they were already doing with their mobile phones, and in 140 chars there is a certain equality that transcends many barriers.
It is a place where unlikely subjects also thrive, philosophy is best exposed to the masses in small chunks. Poetry is possible in 140 chars.
Twitter has taken the bloggers away from competing with the media and into a new role, - that of sustaining the media with information. We know what is happening in Iran due to the fluidity of the medium that the government is unable to suppress. That is a new thing for dictators to contend with, it is technocrats who are revolting now.
Twitter has another effect. It has got us reading newspapers again. Newspapers are publishing our opinions and democracy is more tangible than ever. Does the market want this? Of course it does.
