I loved the playful and shameless rip-off of Maslow's 'hierarchy of needs' applied to the Internet by Evgeny Morozov at the 11:00 point of his TED talk here.
He suggests that Internet users start off using it to have fun (pornography, YouTube); and progress through Talk (email, IM, blogs) to Share (Facebook, Twitter) to Learn (Wikipedia, TED) before a very small proportion uses the Internet actively to campaign.
The ideas are explored further in Morozov's book The Net Delusion which I have on order after an intriguing review in The Economist. More later, if the book turns out to have been worth reading after the hype that got me to buy it!
