时代周刊人物：你 You: Person of the Year

From the December 25, 2006 issue of TIME magazine
(Time.com)-- The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to theScottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of theworld is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is thefew, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as aspecies. That theory took a serious beating this year.
To besure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful anddisturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only gotbloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israeland Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in NorthKorea got the bomb, and the president of Iran wants to go nuclear too.Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn‘t make enoughPlayStation3s.
But look at 2006 through a different lens andyou‘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 seenbefore. It‘s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and themillion-channel people‘s network YouTube and the online metropolisMySpace. It‘s about the many wresting power from the few and helpingone another for nothing and how that will not only change the world,but also change the way the world changes.
The tool that makesthis possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Leehacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way forscientists to share research. It‘s not even the overhyped dotcom Web ofthe late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It‘s a tool forbringing together the small contributions of millions of people andmaking them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as ifit were a new version of some old software. But it‘s really arevolution.
And we are so ready for it. We‘re ready to balanceour diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston andBeijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking atthe backgrounds of YouTube videos -- those rumpled bedrooms andtoy-strewn basement rec rooms -- than you could from 1,000 hours ofnetwork television.
And we didn‘t just watch, we also worked.Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars andreviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about ourcandidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcorderedbombing runs and built open-source software.
America loves itssolitary geniuses -- its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses -- butthose lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Carcompanies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blogpostings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtimeto fend off user-created Linux. We‘re looking at an explosion ofproductivity and innovation, and it‘s just getting started, as millionsof minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauledinto the global intellectual economy.
Who are these people?Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says,I‘m not going to watch Lost tonight. I‘m going to turn on my computerand make a movie starring my pet iguana? I‘m going to mash up 50 Cent‘svocals with Queen‘s instrumentals? I‘m going to blog about my state ofmind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistrodown the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
Theanswer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, forfounding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothingand beating the pros at their own game, Time‘s Person of the Year for2006 is you.
Sure, it‘s a mistake to romanticize all this anymore than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity ofcrowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make youweep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mindthe obscenity and the naked hatred.
But that‘s what makes allthis interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like anyexperiment worth trying, it could fail. There‘s no road map for how anorganism that‘s not a bacterium lives and works together on this planetin numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This isan opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, notpolitician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen tocitizen, person to person. It‘s a chance for people to look at acomputer screen and really, genuinely wonder who‘s out there lookingback at them. Go on. Tell us you‘re not just a little bit curious.