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"This is an opportunity to build a new kind
of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man
to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person."
 In a somewhat gimmicky yet touching move, Time Magazine's famous (and sometimes infamous - see Hitler in 1938) Person of the Year awards has named us, the general blogging, vlogging, myspacing, youtubing, wikipding multitudes as their figure of the year. The award is given in response to those who most effect the news, last year naming Bill and Melinida Gates, and in 2005, the American Soldier.
A genuine reflection of this year's subtle yet unmistakable shift on the web from top down hierarchical media to bottom up social networks with the wisdom of crowds, or just easy flattery to the millions of net users who are deserting print and traditional media in droves (really, we like you! the magazines yell)? Either way, the acceptence of Cluetrain thinking at the top of media tree, perhaps brings any dispute about the shift to the close.
Time Magazine Editorial - Lev Grossman
The "Great Man" theory of
history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas
Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography
of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the
famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took
a serious beating this year....
To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many
painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in
Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted
between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot
dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants
to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony
didn't make enough PlayStation3s.
But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see
another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story
about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's
about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the
million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis
MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping
one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world,
but also change the way the world changes.
The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not
the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according
to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even
the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very
different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small
contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon
Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some
old software. But it's really a revolution.
And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of
predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing.
You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the
backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn
basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network
television.
And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made
Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon
and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote
songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built
open-source software.
America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons,
its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with
others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is
carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is
working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an
explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting
started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in
obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.
Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost
tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my
pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's
instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of
the nation or the steak-frites at
the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media,
for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for
nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the
Year for 2006 is you.
Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds
as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube
make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive
social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail.
There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives
and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion.
But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind
of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man
to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance
for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder
who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a
little bit curious.
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