Person of the Year: You. Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Time

[applegrove]

Person of the Year: You
Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.
By LEV GROSSMAN
SUBSCRIBE TO TIMEPRINTE-MAILMORE BY AUTHORFrom the Editor: Now It's Your Turn

Posted Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2006

"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.

...........SNIP"

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%3Faid%3D434%26from%3Do%26to%3Dhttp%253A//www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%252C9171%252C1569514%252C00.html

[rosesaylavee]

1. Very cool.

We HAVE made history this year. We beat the 'Publicans despite the odds. YAY for us!

[havocmom]

2. Power of the People

Yeah, baby!

[Uncle Joe]

3. How is the web different from what we had in the nineties?

I'm not referring to size or power as more people log on, but structurally? I do not know of any fundamental structural differences. It seems to me, Time is demeaning the work of the internet pioneers such as Tim Berners-Lee whom made the internet possible. I'm curious as to why? I have my own theory of course, but maybe I'm missing something.