This is Pierre Levy’s writing in the prologue of his book “Collective Intelligence”:
“The fusion of telecommunications, informatics, the news media, publishing, television, film, and electronic gaming within a unified industry” is not the only aspect, nor perhaps the most important.

What is the most important then? Here is his thinking along this question:

“We are moving from one humanity to another, a humanity that not only remains obscure and indeterminate, but that we refuse to interrogate, that we are still unwilling to acknowledge.”

“Hominization, the process of the emergence of the human species, is not over. In fact it seems to be sharply accelerating.”

“Bureaucratic hierarchies (based on static forms of writing), media monarchies (surfing the television and media systems), and international economic networks only partially mobilize and coordinate the intelligence, experience, skills, wisdom, and imagination of humanity. For this reason the development of new ways of thinking and negotiating engendered by the growth of genuine forms of collective intelligence becomes particularly urgent. Intellectual technologies are not just another branch of contemporary anthropological change, they are a potential critical zone, its political nexus. There is no reason to belabor this point, however, for we can’t reinvent the instruments of communication and collective thought without reinventing democracy, a distributed, active, molecular democracy. ”
(Italics are originally in Levy’s book. )

Let’s pause for a second. “Reinventing democracy”, what does exactly Professor Levy mean here?