"Drawing on generative technologies like Wikipedia..."

There is nothing all that revolutionary about Jimbo's Big Bag O' Trivia. In fact it embodies all the worst elements of "social structures" that you can find in the real world.

There's elitism, fraud, hypocrisy, secret power games and downright pettiness. On the other hand, if you need to know who did the voice of Dalek #2 in episode 47 of Doctor Who, it's an invaluable resource. It's a shame, your book looks like it might have some interesting points about proprietary vs open source technologies and that is more important than the difference between "sterile" and "generative" technologies.

Myspace may be considered generative in the way that people interact with it, but it is still a proprietary product and the company tries to claim ownership and makes money from users content (just like Facebook, Bebo Youtube etc). On the other hand, you have a piece of hardware like the Asus EEE PC. That may be classed as a sterile technology by design in that the vast majority of users will not create anything more than a few spreadsheets and emails. However, due to it's open source software, it's extremely easy to modify and Asus now directs people to the main community site to get support.

Eventually the proprietary lockdown of software and hardware becomes counter productive as all bug-finding and support has to done in-house. Also, if you've got the only open source product in the market, all of those amateur developers that add value to a product will be effectively working for you and your product can develop faster.