Digital age is social?

I have enjoyed an intensive week in Croatia participating this year's Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA) conference in Dubrovnik and Zadar. Like last time two years ago when I attended the  meeting, it was an excellent combination of interesting papers, surveys of some present issues in digital libraries, library and information issues. My contribution focused on semantic wiki based information repositories with a special reference to documentation of archaeological entities. It is interesting how new themes sneak in to common vocabulary of presentations in conferences. While a couple of years ago mentions of crowdsourcing, participation and social software were confined to few specific papers, it appeared that just about everyone made some kind of reference to users and their (participatory, in the web 2.0 meaning) role in digital contexts. Users role as a contributor or participant seem to be an accepted 'fact'. A question seems to remain, however, that what this socialisation and participation implies in different contexts - for real.