Welcome to FifthEstate.net first post.

In the French Revolution there were the three estates. I recall they were the religion, nobility and the third was everyone else. The "Forth Estate" came to refer to the "Press", which we would now refer to as the "media" or "mainstream media" or "mass media".

There is no official definition of the "Fifth Estate" but it generally is thought to to refer the modern version of "pamphlateering" (sp). This is not new. Soon after the Gutenberg Press, during down time, "seditious" sheets were printed. In the early American Revolution the key factor was ownership of a press.

Technology and economies of scale tended to favor the larger, more centralised news organisations. That said, "Nature hates a vacuum". This gave way to the "rags' and the "Counterculture" alternative publications. I used to own the domain name "fifthestate.org". I gave it to the oldest anarchist newspaper "The Fifth Estate".

That was "dead tree". Probably the first major "fifth estate" use of the Internet. probably the oldest use of the Internet in a high profile situation was "The vast right wing conspiracy" cited by Hillary Clinton after President Clinton's "issues" with Monica Lewinski and the dress"stain".

What actually happened was that the Clinton administrations discovered that all of the assorted conservative "rags" were also posting their material on Internet newsgroup so they had a permanence and worldwide distribution. The Clinton administration envisioned the British" "Yellow' press plucking stories off the Internet writing stories that legitimised them to the American mass media.

The conservatives using the newsgroups saw it as a "distribution channel". The stories in the "rags" would not "die on the vine" as happens a lot with what might be called "small press".

I wasn't part of this but I believe that I understand the basics of it. I do own "fifthestate.net", which could arguably could arguably be the
logical domain of the electronic "revolution". Perhaps my spiels would be better named http://mytwocentsworth.com/ but that is taken.