I am at the moment refering to distributed computing and peer to peer networking as the same thing. I believe that peer to peer networking is a subset of distributed computing. For right now, however, it's the peer to peer networking model that excites me.

A lot has been said about the Internet as a more democratic media. Ie, it takes signifigant material resources to produce an internationally available print publication, and signifigantly less resources to put up a website. There is, however, a difference between putting up a website which in theory could be visited by anyone on the internet, and mainting a website that is actually visited by a large number of people. When traffic reaches a certain level extra resources are needed, additional bandwidth, extra servers, load balancers, etc. These additional resources move the ability to produce media away from those who have less resources to begin with.

Peer to Peer networking offers a way to remove that barrier to production. So far we have seen peer to peer networks which provide for the distribution of music in the form of MP3 files. I would wager, however, that at this moment these networks are being adapted to distribute other forms of content. In my ideal these future distributed content networks may one day replace the current set of controlled media (television, hollywood cinema, commercial radio) as the staple in the media diet of the average citizen.