Time Says You
I learned today that Time magazine has selected "you" as its "Person of the Year." You are "you" if you are a part of the mass of people who generate content for the web. People who upload videos to YouTube are "you," as are those of us who blog or contribute to websites that depend on user generated content. According to the article online:
"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. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution. "
Many people will quibble with this. George Will on the ABC program This Week held back a sneer but his facial expression showed his disdain for the choice even as Richard Stengel, editor of Time discussed the selection. You can see them discussing the choice a little further here.
I have my own quibbles as well. I just recently read Weaving the Web, where Tim Berners-Lee put together an account of his own on this history of what we now understand as the web. It seems, from my reading, the web has in many ways become what he intended, as a way for any person to create and share information for any other person connected. His focus on hypertext may have made him lack anticipation for different kinds of media (video, etc...) to be shared but even this is arguable since his idea included linking files on any one computer to files on another.
But as much as it seems like an incongruous selection from an "old media" giant, I can't deny my agreement with the notion. For the better part of this year I've spent a significant amount of my time listening to podcasts. Even though I have blogged for a while now (on and off, granted) I really started to spend more time on other people's blogs thanks to the ideas of syndication and aggregation - I've been using a site called NetVibes to pull all the blogs and websites that I read into one place. The other night after reading about Lonelygirl15 in Wired I thought I'd take a serious look at YouTube. Amidst a lot of crap I did find some gems like Ugandan hip hop videos. In what other time could a Ugandan musician reach anyone including any of you who bother to click the link?
I also think of the example of LA Observed which started as simpler blog but now seems to have fairly robust coverage of things that should interest people in the area. While a paper like the L.A. Times may be daunting in size, weight, and news stories, a blog that you scan headlines on is easy to keep a handle upon.
And while I'm a sucker for a headline like "democracy of information" I think that the new opportunity to present itself for people on the web is that of the curator; someone who puts together information and takes care of it. It's rare that I'm on YouTube's homepage but there are a lot of "top ten" video sites that I do find myself watching clips on. Even though the idea of a citysearch is quite old, most websites offering information about local events, entertainment, and hangouts are quite useless - as are the reviews people sporadically write. For a long time I've thought of putting up a site that has information about Sioux Falls's coffee houses where I curate the information based on my own personal opinions of what's important: noise level, WiFi, [too much] teen spirit, and how large tables are.
So maybe this year was all about "you" but as the web gets more noisy with useless information and media I hope that the future is about curators - people who take time to sift out the good from the bad, the novel and the useless. It may just be a new type of journalism.
7:59:48 PM 
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