Time magazine's "person of the year": YOU (look at the mirror)
image from gawker
We may not realise it, but each time we participate in the online community, be it blogging, adding our 2 cents worth to Wikipedia, or uploading a video to Youtube, we are contributing towards the "democratisation of the internet": the power of the internet has indeed truly been given to the people.
It is interesting, as a study of emergent properties in systems, and how bottom-up content-creation by millions or billions of individual users can vastly outdo what a top-down approach is capable of. Just look at Wikipedia, the most comprehensive resource available, and a de facto first stop for most of us when wanting to find out about something.
As an internet phenomenon the democratisation of the internet is unrivalled. Personal and social space online is free and plentiful (though fraught with dangers). The reach and the power it gives to the individual (ask mrbrown) is amazing. All is needed from the top is the infrastructure, and perhaps giving it some momentum.
There are implications, of course. First is abuse and censorship: just as people can post useful stuff online, so can the post hate speech and bomb-making instructions. And the internet is horrendously hard to censor, especially when it knows no borders.
Next is the reliability of online sources like Wiki: you probably won't want to rely on it for your thesis paper, but as general reading it is perfectly fine. The error rate is very, very low, and any errors can be corrected easily (unlike print encyclopedias: britannica got jacked when they went to look for errors in wiki, cos someone corrected the errors in 2 days).
But lim (t --> infinity), these problems will iron out. We are stepping closer to the ubiquity of information; the true age of the internet has just dawned.
P.S.
I also contribute to Wiki and Google Video (click on "more from user" in the sidebar".
I can't believe it that my atomic bomb video has 22700 views and 1230 downloads!!! Ok hopefully it has benefitted others.
Other RI wikipedians i know: Ren Yan, Joel Kek, Vincent, Jun Sean, Jeremy Sia
