More on the internet....
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...Time article: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html?aid=434&from=o&to=http%3A//www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2C9171%2C1569514%2C00.html
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...
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...
These are a few clips from TIME's article on the person of the year. The person of the year is you - and me, I guess. I mean since it's all of us that includes me, right. I guess I didn't really have a speech prepared, but I'm pretty good on the spot:
"Well, er hum, thank you. I really appreciate this and I consider it a great honor to be even considered in the category of the caliber of men and women who have accepted this award. I mean, yea, seriously, it is a really cool thing. And, of course, I couldn't have done it without all of you. I mean, after all, we all kinda' won this together. So, I'd like to thank all of you who supported me and sacrificed to make this happened....Oh, yea, and I want to thank God and my mother and father.....Peace out!"
3 comments:
Is any of that changing anything? Or is it a way of doing something, while we escape from actually doing something?
I suppose it could be a way of "seizing the reins of the global media," but right now it seems a little premature to call that. After all, TV is still #1.
Oh, and great speech.
My prediction is that TV and internet will become one in the not too distant future, and that this will change both media....and who knows what else is on the horizon....
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