Clay Shirky has written an excellent entry on the appearance of unmediated photos from the Iraqi front on a Friendster-like service called YAFRO. He likens this — and other instances of undmediated communication — to the Protestant Reformation.
The spread of images from Iraq, both relatively plain ones like most of what's on the YAFRO blogs to the horrifying images of torture and abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison are all part of the removal of bottlenecks that will change the political structure in ways we can't predict.
And it isn't just military affairs, its politics and business and everything else, from attempts to coordinate evidence of Apple's manufacturing errors (previously handled case-by-case, but now becoming a kind of grass-rooots class action protest, to Apple's horror) to the distributed amicus brief on the SCO case conducted by the Linux community to the recent right of Americans to get their medical records on request and within 30 days to the publication of spoilers for popular TV shows. (Read this last link now — its from the Times and goes away in 5 days, and although on the surface its about TV, its really a musing on life in a fully disclosed culture.)
