aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Not you, “us”

From Siva’s MSNBC column about Time’s Person of the Year:

The important movement online is not about “you.” It’s about “us.” It’s about our profound need to connect and share. It’s about our remarkable ability to create among circles - each person contributing a little bit to a poem, a song, a quilt, or a conversation.

So it’s not about your reviews on Amazon. It’s about how we as a community of Web users choose to exercise our collective wills and forge collective consciousnesses. So far, we have declined to do so. We have not harnessed this communicative power to force the rich and powerful to stop polluting our air and water or to stop the spread of AIDS or malaria. We have not brought down any tyrants. We have simply let a handful of new corporations aggregate and exercise their own will on us. And we have perfected online dating.

But there are signs of real profound triumphs of “We.” Wikipedia is the best example. Blogs are another. Communities - both local and global - have generated amazing collections of content and communication in recent years. They have truly challenged the status-quo in ways that Time hypes so well.