“We live in a world of Digital Feudalism,” he wrote. “The land many live on is owned by someone else, be it Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, or some other service that offers up free land and the content provided by the renter of that land essentially becomes owned by the platform that owns the land.”

That may sound extreme, but think of Facebook, which is composed of half a billion freely given user profiles, along with a daily stream of videos, posts and messages. It is both a media site and a social network, and all of the content is provided free of charge. By creating a template for information and a frame around it, along with a community that also serves as an audience, this new generation of content companies have created the equivalent of a refrigerator that manufactures and consumes its own food.

I ended up thinking about all this when I was encouraged to sign up for Quora, the burgeoning question-and-answer social site, by some of my more tech-minded friends. As I was going through the registration, I had a “hey, wait a minute” moment: right now, my in-box is full of all manners of questions and requests I can’t get to, some of them from my own family. What in the world am I doing wandering out into a community of strangers to answer and post questions?

It will be interesting to see how the legions of unpaid bloggers at The Huffington Post react to the merger with AOL. Typing away for an upstart blog  founded by the lefty pundit Arianna Huffington and the technology executive Kenneth Lerer  would seem to be a little different from cranking copy for AOL, a large American media company with a market capitalization of $2.2 billion.

(And it’s going to seem very different to some other media companies. The Huffington Post has perfected the art of  how shall we say it?  enthusiastic aggregation. Most of the news on the site is rewritten from other sources, then given a single link to the original. Many media companies, used to seeing their scoops get picked off by HuffPo and others, have decided that legal action isn’t worth the bother. They might feel differently now.)

Perhaps content will remain bifurcated into professional and amateur streams, but as social networks eat away at media mindshare and the advertising base, I’m not so sure. If it happens, I’ll have no one but myself to blame. Last time I checked, I had written or shared over 11,000 items on Twitter. It’s a nice collection of short-form work, and I’ve been rewarded with lot of followers ... and exactly no money. If and when the folks at Twitter cash out, some tiny fraction of that value will have been created by me.

The desire to create for the digital civic common stems from an ancient impulse, but finds remarkable expression in a digital age. Nobody knows more about that than Mayhill Fowler, the intrepid and unpaid citizen journalist working for The Huffington Post’s OffTheBus in the 2008 presidential campaign, who caught candidate Barack Obama talking about “bitter” voters who “cling to guns or religion.”