-
You win, we win
Time’s annual Person of the Year award has gone to… you.
That’s the collective you, the ‘you’ that are writing your blog posts, sharing your pictures and videos, commenting, rating, syndicating. Across the country, across the age ranges and socially groupings you’ve been doing so in unprecedented numbers this year.
2006 is the year that we stopped being consumers of the internet and became participants in it.
As Time puts it:
‘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 full Time piece is worth reading, but while I think Time pretty much ‘gets’ it, I think it still manages to even underestimate the scale and significance of what is going on.
Yes, most of this is happening in the online ’space’, but it is extending everywhere, driven by the change taking place online. It is changing not just the internet, but every other medium along the way.
Television programmes are relying ever more on your input, radio stations are extending their phone-in content featuring you, advertising and marketing campaigns are seeking to use ‘you’ to sell their products. Newspaper columnists, once able to sit in lofty judgement above us all are now subject to our comments, positive and negative. The top-down editor/director/producer knows best approach is dying fast.
We - you - now determine how we consume content, when we do, where we do so.
