January 15, 2007

Here's to you

Dr. Robert Peltier, PE,

TIME magazine's selection of a Person of the Year often is unusual enough to be covered in other publications. In most years, the pick has been fairly predictable: a high-profile foreign or domestic politico playing high-stakes poker with our collective futures. In others, TIME has stretched the definition of "person"—such as in 1982 (the computer), 1988 (Earth), and 2003 (the American soldier). For 2006, TIME made another curious choice with "You"—individuals who interact via dialog, opinion, and audiovisual content on independent web sites, blogs, and technology platforms like MySpace, YouTube, and podcasts.

 

Who is/are You? TIME calls You a "community and collaboration on a scale never seen before." With the growing reach and speed of Internet access, unfiltered knowledge and opinion now are available in real time to anyone, anywhere with the inclination and means to log on and search. The number of computer users worldwide passed 1 billion in 2005 and will double by 2011.
 

Let's talk

This Internet free-for-all, what TIME calls Web 2.0, "empowers" individuals. Anyone with a camera-equipped cellphone can post images or video of any event—from the mundane to the momentous—for the world to see moments after it takes place. Personal marketing is another obvious application. For example, putative 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama has posted his video introduction to Monday Night Football on YouTube. At press time, the 71-second clip—one of 363 videos he has on the site—was averaging only a 2�-star viewer rating.

Web 2.0 is where individuals can converse, find common ground, and make a difference, according to TIME. In addition to slashing everyone's 15 minutes of Warholian fame to 15 seconds (or 15 megabytes?), the new media are threatening old media. Traditional newspapers and magazines can no longer monopolize the power of the press because everyone now owns one. The challenge for POWER going forward is to continue using our editors' deep and wide industry experience to separate the editorial wheat from the chaff. But now we also can include You in the process, via feedback vehicles far richer and more instantaneous than letters to the editor.

 

 

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