Adriana Lukas sums up the impact of the web in three levels, touching on democracy, authority, the individual, technology. As always, it's worth reading in full, but here's a highlight:

...people are learning something: They are learning self-determination and unlearning decades of one-way communication and mass broadcasting. The ability to express and respond to things on their own terms and their own way is what this is about. And in some senses, autonomy is a more meaningful definition of freedom as it entail my freedom to do many things essential to my identity.