Danah Boyd on participatory divide

By and large, conversations focus on the ways in which the virtual drives the real (either positively or negatively) but I think it's also important to highlight when the real drives the virtual in ways that are also mob-esque in behavior. I'm thinking very much about what I experienced at Web2.0 Expo this year (documented here: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/11/24/spectacle_at_we.html ) This is of course a different path from the political direction in which the thread took, but I still think it's an interesting case study (and not just because I was the target of it).