In this Media Report on ABC Radio National Henry Jenkins, the Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that the fact that web 2.0 has taken office quickly as it has, is a product of the fact that there are a large number of communities aren't in place that have been fighting for a long time to get to this point. They are part of a much larger history of people's desire to take media in their own hands and to produce content that reflect their own perspective, their own experience.

He adds about YouTube:

what's striking about YouTube is that it is a shared portal where all of these groups come together. Even as recently as a decade ago, people were predicting that online video would result in millions of individualised networks, small networks where people distributed video. No-one predicted I think that it would be the shared portal, that all these groups would come together. And as they come together, they're learning from each other: ideas cross pollinate across these various sub-cultures, educational groups, activist groups, citizen journalist, governmental groups are all learning from each other, they're beginning to collaborate with each other, and the result is a much more integrated public sphere through the communication and video than I think we saw before. But any given group has its own history leading up to that, and many of those groups have had to make conscious decisions about whether they want to use YouTube as a platform or not. And that's not an easy decision for some of these groups, given their histories.