Category: issues concerning teenagers
Original article: Time's Person of the Year: You
Lev Grossman, Time Magazine
image from gawker
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.
Personal response
We may not realize it, but each time we participate in the online community, be it blogging, or contributing to Wikipedia or Youtube, we are participating in the "democratization of the internet". Today, the power of the internet has indeed truly been given to the people.
It is interesting how bottom-up content-creation by millions or billions of individual users can vastly outdo what a top-down approach is capable of. Take for instance Wikipedia, the de facto first stop for many curious individuals – it surpasses traditional encyclopedias in comprehensiveness.
It is also awfully heartening, as a manifestation of society’s collective spirit that in today’s materialistic world can be painfully lacking. It was the contributions of netizens, pieced together, that enabled sites like Wikipedia or Youtube to flourish, and everyone to benefit.
As an Internet phenomenon the democratization of the internet is unrivaled. The reach and the power it gives to the individual is amazing.
I have firsthand been awed by the power of the Internet through one video, on the science behind nuclear bombs (one performance task), I uploaded onto Google Video. It has netted close to 25 thousand hits – a figure way beyond my wildest imagination when I chose to upload it for the benefit of others.
So what does the Internet’s power mean for today’s youth? First, information, for this generation that embraces technology ever so readily, is literally at their fingertips (perpetually placed on a keyboard). With all its user-generated information (and great resources like Wikipedia), the democratized Internet is, therefore, an oasis for their insatiable curiosity, and together with its interactive and appealing multimedia content, a vastly superior learning tool.
Personal and social space online is free and plentiful. Blogs are perhaps the best exemplar – it is the teen’s online identity, his personal space, from which he can draw pride and self-attainment. Blogs, being public, also function as social space, through which teens get to know others better, especially since blogs are frequently linked to each other, forming a huge network. Finally, online chat extends socialization to the digital world.
The democratization of the Internet, however, is fraught with dangers. This phenomenon has given profit-minded perverts and terrorists alike the chance to create pornographic, violent, or otherwise undesirable sites. The free flow of information from these sites can prove pernicious to the teen’s tender (if stubborn) minds. Social tools like online dating or chat can be exploited, for instance by pedophiles that may take advantage of teens.
The sheer volume of interesting entertainment available on the Internet poses a strong temptation to procrastinate – this applies not just to teens, I believe. I’ve fallen prey to it before, and I know how hard clicking that small X on the top right of your browser can be.
It is with its newfound democratization that the true age of the Internet dawns. Teenagers be wary – but take it with a dose of discipline, and you stand to benefit immensely.
(494 words)
