Person of the Year: You
17.12.06
08:35:16 am, by juan 
, 799 words, 2122 views 
Categories: Software Social, Blogs, medios y política, Web 2.0
Person of the Year: You
Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.
By LEV GROSSMAN
The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.
To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.
But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'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 seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
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.
And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.
And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.
America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into 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 computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.
Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious. (From Time Inc.)
Trackback address for this post:
Comments, Trackbacks, Pingbacks:
No Comments/Trackbacks/Pingbacks for this post yet...
Leave a comment:
Juan Carreón
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| << < | > >> | |||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |||
Search
Categories
- All
- Artículos (274)
- Contexto TI (387)
- Diseño de Programas (122)
- Familiy (5)
- Fruxant (32)
- Política (385)
- DF (26)
- Global (256)
- Iberoamérica (294)
- México (372)
- Tlalpan, Coyoacán (2)
- Software Social (246)
- Blogs, medios y política (103)
- América Latina (35)
- México (61)
- Podcasting (53)
- Videoblogs (19)
- Web 2.0 (42)
- Wikis (22)
- Blogs, medios y política (103)
Archives
- March 2009 (1)
- February 2009 (1)
- January 2009 (3)
- December 2008 (30)
- November 2008 (19)
- October 2008 (53)
- September 2008 (28)
- August 2008 (7)
- July 2008 (24)
- June 2008 (72)
- May 2008 (46)
- April 2008 (17)
- More...
Choose skin
Linkblog
Fruxant
- 1001 Tecnochica
Página de chica geek
- 28, 29, 30 de septiembre / Puerto Vallarta
Entre los invitados está RMS
A quien se hace referencia comúnmente por sus iniciales RMS es una figura central del movimiento del software libre. Sus mayores logros como programador incluyen el editor de texto Emacs, el compilador GCC, y el depurador GDB, bajo la rúbrica del Proyecto GNU.
Pero su influencia es mayor por el establecimiento de un marco de referencia moral, político y legal para el movimiento del software libre, como una alternativa al desarrollo y distribución de software privativo. Es también inventor del concepto de Copyleft, un método para licenciar software de tal forma que este permanezca siempre libre y su uso y modificación siempre reviertan en la comunidad.
- Avance imparable de la telefonía IP
Por: Staff High Tech Editores
Para Tomar en Cuenta
Al cierre del presente año el valor en dólares de las ventas de soluciones de redes en México crecerá respecto al 2004...90%
En telefonía IP.26%
En soluciones inalámbricas.18%
En datos.13%
En otros rubros.2%
En telefonía tradicional.* Fuente: Select.
Con un estimado de crecimiento de 90% entre el anterior y el presente año, el mercado de telefonía IP se muestra como el más dinámico en el ambiente de telecomunicaciones nacional.
De acuerdo con un análisis de Select, la adopción y madurez de la tecnología de redes privadas virtuales (VPN) seguirá incentivando el crecimiento de la telefonía IP, a grado tal que las extensiones IP participarán en la base total de 4% a 12% al cierre del 2005.
El papel que las redes inalámbricas locales pueden ocupar como soluciones para las pequeñas y medianas empresas del país permite avizorar que este tipo de infraestructura pronto será el estándar en todos los tamaños de organizaciones.
Otros aspectos que también influirán en el crecimiento de esta tendencia son: el incremento en la penetración de servicios inalámbricos de voz, lo que provoca un decremento en la demanda de servicios “tradicionales” de voz (local y de larga distancia); asimismo, los consumidores han mostrado interés en soluciones VoIP (Voz sobre IP) que permitan servicios a bajo costo, además de múltiples ventajas; se ve también una sustitución de líneas fijas tradicionales por líneas sobre banda ancha, además de que las empresas tienden a ofrecer servicios “triple-play” (voz, video y datos).
- Books by Ray
Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.
- Crecimiento de 21.5% de las Telecomunicaciones en México
El Economista, 29/8/2005
- Dilbert
El tipo 5 del eneagrama en TI
Dilbert en español: http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/spanish/
- Ebay compra Skype, acuerdo podría llegar a 4.100 mln dlr: fuente
- European tech giants form software consortium: Open Source
European tech giants form software consortium
British Telecom, Nokia, SAP and Siemens are among a dozen or so high-tech companies lining up to support efforts to strengthen Europe's position in the global software and information technology industries. To that end, the companies launched a consortium on Wednesday called the Networked European Software and Services Initiative, or NESSI. - Futuro halagüeño para Linux, RFID, SMS: Gartner
El crecimiento de Linux y el uso de radiofrecuencia (RFID) destacan entre diez principales tecnologías con mayor presencia en el mercado durante el próximo año y las que tienen una proyección a más largo plazo, de acuerdo con Gartner.
- Icon, Steve Jobs
Abstract of the book
- IT Marketers Best Served by Being Straightforward
White papers may be the best business-to-business marketing tool for selling IT products, a new study finds. KnowledgeStorm conducted the "Define What's Valued Online" survey for the CMO Council to identify how online technology influences IT buying.
- Japonesa compraría PalmSource, creador sistema operativo 'Palm'
- Linux World México
Para considerar
- MarketingLoop.com
Small business owners, content publishers, and service professionals…
- Massachusetts to adopt 'open' desktop
The commonwealth of Massachusetts has proposed a plan to phase out office productivity applications from Microsoft and other providers in favor of those based on "open" standards, including the recently approved OpenDocument standard.
- Mexico ads playing up candidates
Para los extranjeros que disfrutan y padecen la Ciudad de México y además por razones profesionales tienen que seguir la guerra mediática y fuera de los medios entre Calderón y AMLO:
"The fiercest and funniest attacks have come in the form of homemade videos distributed on Internet sites like YouTube.com. In one, Barney the dinosaur and a chorus of children sing a profanity-laden ditty taunting López Obrador. Another video, this one anti-Calderón, offers a primer on 'How To Commit Electronic Vote Fraud.'" afirma Chris Hawley
- Microsoft Windows Officially Broken
Windows was broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.
- Modelo abierto de la ciencia
La Red, la PC, Linux surgieron por individuos que trabajaron sobre lo que es la pasión y la motivación propias
Del mismo autor pueden consultarse:
http://www.tecnologiaempresarial.info/resultados.asp?buscar=juan+carre%F3n&x=9&y=10
- Neuropedia
Un wiki mexicano elaborado con wikimedia
- Open Source: the Next Generation
BusinessWeeek, Special Report
Misc
XML Feeds
What is RSS?
Who's Online?
- Guest Users: 20
powered by
