I am delighted that so many people have registered for the first of Policy Unplugged's Uploading...series. The theme running through all the events is the wider cultural, societal and economic significance of the collaboration that is taking place on the Web. I increasingly want to go beyond - the entirely justifiable - hullabaloo surrounding social media and start to explore what it means for how we educate our kids, interact with democracy, how we work and play, how we conduct our friendships etc.

The claims made by people like Dan Tapscott  and Tom Friedman and thousands of less popular commentators about the likely impact of mass collaboration on our lives are compelling and euphoric but do they really tally with your everyday experience at school, at work when you deal with civic institutions? It feels like early days to me which is both exciting but also the right time to be thinking about the wider implications of what is happening; to ask the kind of questions that Michael Bywater 'what have we lost?'  and Nicholas Carr 'our beautiful mindlessness' have been asking... Michael Gorman, the president of the American Library Association siad recently. "No one would tell you a student using Google today is producing work as good as they were 20 years ago using printed sources. Despite these amazing technical breakthroughs, these technologies haven't added to human wellbeing."

Thinking about what this means for innovation policy in the UK feels like a great place to start. Last week, over a drink, Russell Davies - who I am delighted is coming along to our event next thing - said two things that have stayed one was 'I never thought of the UK having a innovation economy' and I it is not us - the first wave of collaboratives - that are important it is the next lot who will really make the difference.

Dave Edgerton the historian of technology and innovation argues in his new book The Shock of the Old  that the hinterland implications of great breakthrough technologies - the motor vechicle being the classic example - are what we should be really alive to. His book might just in a strange way be a useful place to start when thinking about inovation anew....