The final principle of Mobile 2.0 is recognizing that we are in a new age of consumerism. Yesterday’s consumer does not look anything like today’s consumer. The people of today’s market don’t view themselves as consumers, but rather as creators. But before we get into that, let’s back up for a minute.

The web is about content. Sure, there are programming languages, APIs, and other technical underpinnings, but what do you do when you open a web browser? You read. Our primary task online is to read, to gain information. During the early days of the Web, it took tools and know-how in order to publish to the Web. But early in the Web 2.0 evolution, we saw a rise in tools that allowed us to publish to the Web easily, giving individuals a voice online, with a massive audience.

This democratization of the Web took many forms that some call “social media,” like blogging, social networks, media sharing, microblogging, and lifestreams. Although social media may have many facets, they all share the same goal: to empower normal, everyday people to become creators and publishers of content. It started with the written word, then music, then photos, and more recently video was added. Entire markets have been created to provide today’s consumer with gadgets, software, and web services to record and publish content so that we can share it with our friends and loved ones.

At the center of this revolution in publishing is the mobile device. As networked portable devices become more powerful, allowing us to capture, record, and share content in the moment, we are able to add a new kind of context to content—the likes of which we haven’t seen since satellite television. Now you can share any moment with any group of people in real time. Think about how powerful a concept that is! It could change entire cultures.

Tony Fish, coauthor of Mobile Web 2.0, says:

When everyone has the tools to create content, in addition to zero-cost publishing, we do not consume content, we create it.

In the early days of the Web, I marveled at how a networked population might change our society forever. Now I realize that the change occurs wherever the device is, the context it is within. The early “Web 1.0” days clearly changed how business is done, because businesses are the primary consumer of desktop computers. It probably is no coincidence that Web 2.0 occurred around the same time that laptop computers became affordable for the average person, making the Web a more personal medium.

With Mobile 2.0, the personal relevance of the content matches how personal the device is and how personally it applies to our everyday situations or our context. I see now that this is the time and medium that delivers on that initial promise of the Web: to change society forever.