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Person of the Year: You
Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world. By 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
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.
And we are so ready for it. |
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