I was at Sundance last week and the best of anything I saw while I was there was a panel discussion about Web 2.0. This being Sundance, a lot of big-up people were speaking on the panel, sponsored by "New Frontier" - the edgy, techy, interesting arm of the Festival.

Karen Swisher was moderating the panel and she was fantastic - very droll but well-equipped with a hyperactive bullshit-detector. She's a journalist with the Wall Street Journal and her take on Web 2.0 seemed to be: why are corporations such idiots, and why haven't they embraced this? As she put it: "If someone's going to eat your lunch, it might as well be you."

Swisher worried however, that outfits like YouTube are becoming great repositories for America's Funniest Home Videos, and that was it.

Well, one of the panelists explained, consumers prefer to "snack" on their media today - this "snacking" has resulted in the explosion of My Space and YouTube "long tails" of entertainment and information. Furthermore, producers of this media are more about the recognition than the reward for their efforts. Social networks are the future of media production and these networks merit their own non-fiscal rewards.

However, a growing number of media producers are becoming dissatisfied with this assumption and indeed do want to find a way to support themselves as creators by distributing their content on-line. Revver.com is one company trying to make this happen, and Steve Starr, the founder, was there to explain how this works (I'm sorry - I didn't quite catch it - click throughs, etc).

Somewhere in the description of the event, the word "anti-capitalist" had appeared, but I heard no mention of the word throughout the panel. There was a lot of discussion of algorithisms and page tracking, a lot more discussion about how corporations need to learn how to better integrate into network culture, but no discussion about how these emerging social networks might mean a fundamental challenge to monopoly media production.

Is that because they might not?

I do think that the long tail is a good tail -- more choice of media from a greater variety of options means more voices reaching eager and accidental listeners: but I'm worried about "radical democratization" being reduced to this. Information is power, it's true. But identity is so much thicker than this.

My question, had they picked me, would have been: there seem to be two main ways people are talking about this growth of on-line social networks: the first is that it becoming increasingly understood that it is "bad business" for companies to ignore or not take advantage of open source media; the second is that open source media poses a fundamental challenge to profit-driven corporate media, i.e. sometimes even called "anti-capitalist." While there is over-lap between these two positions - e.g. independent filmmakers looking for alternative markets to support their art - these stances are at odds, yet the "radical democracy" component is being slowly erased, and the conflict is being re-cast as good corporations versus bad corporations: dinosaurs vs adaptive to open source. And thus while the long tail thrashes, the social enclosures of monopoly capitalism (as YouTube, Skype, etc., are all bought up) persist unabated...