To understand the nature, popularity and importance of the Internet, I think it's critical to look not at the tools we use on-line but at what we do when we're using them.

If we picture our lives in contemporary society as unfolding in a physical space, we might use the metaphor of a closet.

It's dark, restrictive and isolated. The door is closed and no information of any value can get in. We can occasionally, momentarily, and with some difficulty, push open that door a crack but we only catch momentary glimpses of others doing the same. There is so much we want to know about them but there's so little time before the door shuts again.

In this society, our psyches, social interactions, routines, and thinking are pushed into so many small, dark closets.

And yet we all keep pushing the door open. In a society that discourages truly deep and intimate human relations, we figure out all kinds of ways to counteract the painful alienation of the closed closet: personal relationships, organizations, events and ways of sharing thinking, feelings and aspirations. Yet, as rich and fruitful as we courageously make these things, they are never enough. We want and need to relate to more and more people in an ever deeper way, to grasp great and broader realities, to learn more about everything so we can make sense of what we're experiencing.

The Internet is a function of that struggle and its rise was inevitable. If we didn't have this technology, we would have used another. We are ready.

In fact, at its roots, every communications technology we've developed has been aimed at opening the door. In the end, all have proven limited.

We can phone only those we know and we can't see them when we do. We watch television, listen to radio and consume all mass media filtered through the perceptions, experiences and agendas of a relatively small group of people. We learn, for sure, we grow possibly but we seldome emerge more powerful from interactions with those technologies. The glimpses are longer and more comprehensive but they are still, in the end, glimpses and the closet door snaps shut.

The Internet is unlike any previous communications technology because it's not a technology: it's a social movement that uses a technology.

Faced with alienation, disunity and disempowerment that has brought us to the brink of personal despair, human annihilation and the physical destruction of our world, we respond as we always have, as our ancestors of so long ago did. We come together to collaborate.

It's a truth well established that the development of the Internet's technology has been an act of collaboration; everything about this technology is the product of countless people working together for no reason other than their desire to make it easier for people to communicate.

But what's different about the Internet is that the collaboration isn't only by those developing the technology; it's a collaboration by those using it.

We use its tools collaboratively: learning from each other and often being forced to learn new things by those with whom we want to communicate. You remember your first use of email? Why did you start? Probably because someone you wanted to communicate with needed you to.

And the expansion of the Internet is a product of collaboration by its users. The Web, the central star in the Internet's galaxy, has been constantly expanding not because web developers come up with ideas on their own but because people who use the web, work with it, develop its sites and visit those sites are constantly pushing to expand its use.

So that simple one page sites and message boards gives rise to blogs. Personal websites become "Internet Personal Presences" like myspace or Yahoo 360. People sending copies of email to lists of contacts develop into to the mail list. Technological limitations, that always discouraged us from fully using technology, now become guidelines for expanding its use.

This is the interaction between a technology and people who are empowered by it, confident to use it fully and make it more powerful when its capabilities fall short. Developers are simply skilled users who are listening and noticing. In fact, every developer begins as a user and never stops being one.

Most of all, the Internet experience is unique not only in what it allows us to do but how much of ourselves it allows us to show.

With this remarkable combination of graphics, text and links, we can not only open the closet door farther but we can show more of ourselves when it does. We share not only snippets of our thinking or feeling or experience; we can now share as much of our lives as we want.

And in sharing our lives with others, we begin to alter the definition of truth. No longer is truth what someone with communications power says it is. With the Internet millions of people can simultaneously express their version of truth, based on those lives and experiences they are sharing.

News is not only what reporters are saying; it's often what those making the news are sharing about their experiences. Analysis of events and issues is no longer just the few comments (from "both" sides) encased in the expressed opinions of the analyst. Now we are exposed to hundreds, even thousands of "sides". In the process, we collaborate on the truth, exchanging opinions and information and sifting through what we are exposed to with the filter of our own experience.

Never before in human history has such a process been possible and that is the key to the Internet's impact. We are empowered to massively collaborate on what is true and then to unite to do something about it.

The Internet is the largest social movement in human history and it is becoming a movement that comprises all of humanity.

Which means something very important for people who work to change this world -- revolutionaries, progressive, social justice activists. In my next, and final, blog on the Organic Internet I'll share some of my thoughts on that.