So, the scientists really lead the way in harnessing the power of the printing press to collectively make more and better future.
For the internet, I believe that mantle has fallen to the open source community - groups of individuals and corporations collaborating on software because every participant either wants to use the product that they are creating, has customers that they can sell the end result to, or else is just having fun working on the problem and isn't too worried about which problem they spend their time working on.