Time Magazine, in a break from tradition, and in a year of transition, selected You as their person of the year. You, as in, us citizens, us bloggers, us YouTubers, us citizen soldiers, us whistleblowers. Contrariwise, you know it's a bubble when 'the Beast with a Billion Eyes' outflanks the Tehran Don. The magazine goes gaga over 'citizen media', breathlessly terming the Web 'a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.'
As part of the exegesis of the You hypothesis, the magazine profiles the YouTube guys, you know, the ones who converted America Funniest Home Videos 2.0 into 5.5 million lindens. Profit be damned, legality be damned, leastways, we can all watch endless loops of the macaca moment, interspersed with social experimentation gone boink.
To further drive home the point of the massification of culture and media, 15 has-beens/citizen celebrities are featured, ranging from Kaavya Vishwanathan to Heather Mills McCartney, and contrasted with 15 shining examples of citizen democracy, such as Lonelygirl15 and Facebooker Megan Gill to milblogger Captain Lee Kelly. Displaying cultural and literary ignorance, the magazine notes in the case of military bloggers, "Unlike generations of soldiers before them, they're writing for history." Take that, Julius Caesar!
The power of public opinion is indeed strong, and has affected global change in the past. A positive benefit of the democratization of media through YouTube, Flickr, et al, is the rapidity and fluidity with which information flows through society. Yet, this flow, like all flows can be managed, and a million macaca moments created, inflated, and exploited. One would not deny the rich value of individual contribution to social progress, yet, we are still at war, black holes festoon the Internet, and society still faces a million random acts of senseless cruelty. The Grim Meathook vision of the future where 'everything just sort of keeps going on the way it has, with incremental changes, and technology is no longer the deciding factor in things' is distinct from the Web 2.0/3.0/∞ version of the future espoused by the You hypothesis. Both versions can come to pass and form our reality - You can make both happen, in essence.
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