I was at the Guildford/4Walls event last weekend, where Vanessa Warwick was talking about how things have now shifted from the vertical to the horizontal, which I found to be very inspirational:

The ladder has fallen
In the past the closed, restrictive & controlling society meant that there was a vertical ladder – with individuals at the bottom and large corporations at the top.
The old ways meant that the more you spent on marketing, the more your message was heard. The costs involved prevented individuals and small businesses from competing at the same level. Vanessa talked about how this is no longer the case, and it is a return to the individual.

With the spread of the web and social media, now one individual can have the same or greater influence, regardless of amount spent.

The vertical has moved to the horizontal.

Recent examples of this include:
Ashton Kutcher, who had more followers on twitter than CNN – how much do CNN spend on marketing?
The Susan Boyle youtube video. How much would a company have had to spend on marketing to get their video viewed 100 million times?

I recently tweeted a link to a Wall Street Journal article on the spread of laptop use amongst the homeless. Now that technology prices have fallen so low for secondhand computers and combined with the availability of free wireless access – everyone has the same potential influence.