I'm slowly working my way through the last two Sundays' New York Times, and was surprised to see that on December 10, one week before Time magazine unveiled its "Person of the Year: You" cover, the Arts & Leisure section headlined with "2006, Brought to You By You."

The article, by Jon Pareles (and already in money jail, so there's no sense linking to it — in the Age of You, the Times insists on remaining them), leads with the recent enormous corporate purchases of MySpace (by Rupert Murdoch, for $580 million) and YouTube (by Google, for $1.65 billion, spawning an entity one wag — must've been you — dubbed either Yoogle or Goo Tube).

Pareles described these sprawling demotic showcases as "empty vessels," to be filled by whomever (yeah, you) with whatever. (Props to Jon Swift for the funniest take on Time's cover, which inspired me.)

You'd think the media bigwigs who decide what leads had been talking to each other, and of course they have. No doubt they all eat at the same restaurants. This coincidence isn't conspiracy, it's just buzz — the contagion of a meme-sneeze. "User-generated content," which Pareles exposes (less pretentiously, but more condescendingly) as the ancient urge to "self-expression" in hip digital duds, is the hot new gold mine.

There's (their) money in (our) narcissism. Like Time's cover, the big media think they've hit on a hot new commodity: mirrors. The first peddler who showed up in town with those in his pack probably got stampeded, too.

That's the conventional wisdom about this explosion of technology-enabled amateurism: it's a huge "American Idol," a cattle-call audition of a billion wannabes, seizing instead of waiting for their 15 minutes of fame, dreaming of being discovered by the big camera, like Norma Jean at Schwab's Drugstore. Most of you never will be discovered because your little yawp for attention is not attended by talent and patience and craft.

There's something else going on besides, and maybe deeper than, self-display; something that's not about the product or even the person, but the process. It's a kind of Sleeping Beauty awakening, a throwing-off of the great hypnotized passivity of the TV era, and of the high arts before it.

Call it the Revolt of the Audience. We've all been taking in and taken in for decades, maybe centuries. There's been an extreme polarity and a severe hierarchy between artist and audience. One was active, the other passive. One was somebody, the other nobody. The flow was one-way. All we could give back was applause, attention, acclaim: nothing more differentiated than a collective yay or boo, and most importantly, and anonymously, our money. We counted, but only as numbers. (Do you hear the "numb" in "numbers"?)