Last post for 2006!

It’s been a weird year for the world, as well as for me. Humanity seems to be moving further and further away from tolerance and closer and closer to dropping another nuclear bomb on our own planet. Talk about cutting your nose off to spite your face, eh?

Anyhow, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2006 is “you”. An article from the magazine (edition for 25th December 2006) says it far better than I can, so here are some excerpts that got me thinking:

“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.”

“…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.”

Two things struck me about this choice of Person of the Year (POTY). For starters, is this lack of an individual POTY a sorry condemnation that all those people in power chose to do terrible things, rather than terribly good things, this year? And secondly, does “you” include all 6 billion of us? Or only those that blogged, posted videos or in some way contributed to online publications? We live in a world where the majority of people do not have access to the Internet, so does this “magnanimous” gesture of Time Magazine’s exclude them? The answer is that it has to. So, while I thought they made a great choice for POTY – there is no denying that participatory journalism will to some extent (I’m just not sure how great an extent that is) revolutionise the media and entertainment industry (of course, reality tv falls into this category too, along with the home-made YouTube efforts) – I somehow feel saddened by the fact that this choice highlights the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots. In fact, the Internet has probably been one of the greatest causes of that expanding gulf.

However, living with Peas, I can hardly deny the power of the blogger. During the course of the year she has: won two blogging awards; got into hot water for her name-and-shame exposure of her insurance company’s attempt to have non-original parts fitted to her car; been vitriolically written about in a newspaper; and even been interviewed on air. Hundreds of people frantically keep hitting the refresh button on their permanently-open www.mushypeasontoast.blogspot.com window to see if she has graced their comments to her post with a reply – she’s a brand in her own right.

But I digress – for a reflective post on my year, I have managed to say nothing at all about it. So I’ll sum it up in one sentence: it has not turned out to be the year I imagined it would be in December 2005, but it has actually been a rather good one anyway. I’ve named it the ‘year of the mini-holiday’, due to my numerous weekend trips to different places in and around South Africa – and that means it had to have been good, right? For the rest of it, I will not dwell upon it here. My energy is far better spent thinking about the year ahead, which I hope to name ‘the year of change’. But more about that in the future…

So, a very merry Christmas and a fuddled, yet hangover-free New Year’s to all of you! Thank you to my bloggy acquaintances for all your posts and comments on mine: you’ve entertained me, taught me loads, and provided me with ample distraction from my work. Have safe and wonderful holidays, and I look forward to all the stories in the New Year!