You December 26, 2006
THAT was a very interesting Person of the Year that Time Magazine chose this year. I couldn’t agree more.
That Person of the Year is “You.” You, the individual reader, the individual person, the individual occupier of space on this planet, are Time’s choice as the one living being that had the greatest impact on the world this year. Traditional wisdom, which owes to Thomas Carlyle, says the history of the world is just the biography of great men. Not so, says Time. Or no longer so today.
“Look at 2006… 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….”
Thomas Friedman already noted this development in his 2002 book “Longitudes and Attitudes.” He posited that to understand 9/11, you had to understand the broad canvas behind it. That broad canvas was what was happening to the nation-state. Three things in particular, he said, had changed dramatically.
The first was the relation between nation-states. We have only one superpower left, which is the United States, which has to deal with a host of small nation-states. The second was the relation between nation-states and global markets, or economic globalization. And the third was the relationship between nation-states and individuals.
“Because globalization has brought down many of the walls that limited the movement and reach of people, and because it has simultaneously rewired the world into networks, it gives more power to individuals to influence both markets and nation-states than at any other time in history. Whether by enabling people to use the Internet to communicate instantly at almost no cost over vast distances, or by enabling them to use the Web to transfer money to obtain weapons designs that normally would have to be controlled by states … globalization can be an incredible force-multiplier for individuals. Individuals can increasingly act on the world stage directly, unmediated by the state.”
I myself have been writing about this from quite another perspective, which is the digital revolution. Its enormous impact I saw during Edsa People Power II. To this day, I maintain that one of the most critical factors that took Joseph Estrada out was the Filipino community abroad, which made their sentiments known through the e-mail and cellular phone. The volume of e-mail that landed in the Inquirer Online at that time was phenomenal. Unlike Edsa People Power I, which reduced the Filipinos abroad largely to spectators, Edsa People Power II elevated the Filipinos abroad to the status of active participants. That was so because of the new technology, which allowed them to take part in the dramatic events in this country in real time, or near-real time. They might as well have been here, if in virtual form.
That technology has made even more tremendous strides since then. The prediction that TV, communications and computers would soon merge has come true. Tomorrow is today, as witness the cellular phones that can receive TV signals and do computing work.
Since Edsa People Power II I’ve been repeatedly saying that the new technology will alter profoundly our concept of news -- and sooner than we think. Online News, in particular, has added whole new meanings to the word “interactive.” “News” is no longer an etched-in-tablet, handed-down-from-heaven, final word on the subject. It is something completely correctable -- and correctable almost as soon as it sees life online. You will get an instant reaction on it, from grateful or irate readers. What makes Wikipedia truly wondrous isn’t just that it is one colossal encyclopedia freely available to everyone. It is that its version of the “truth” can be changed anytime. In fact, it actively encourages readers to send additions and corrections to its entries.
I’ve been telling NGOs all this time that at no time has their work become more viable. Traditional sources of authority are being subverted every day by a technology that is allowing more and more people to have more say in how things are run, or ought to be run. Of course, that includes them: their own authority is being subverted by a technology that is allowing individuals with a computer and a telephone to unburden themselves of their 10 cents’ worth on any issue that takes their fancy.
The last suggests the downside to all this. As Time notes, “Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom” and “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.” And as Friedman suggests, you can use the Web as much to foment iniquity as end tyranny, as much to hatch terrorist plots as stop plots to mount dictatorships.
But I’m personally hopeful, and not a little excited, about democracy coming out ahead rather than behind from these developments. Democracy itself is like that, too: it allows crackpots, as much as sages, to have their say on how things ought to be. But collective wisdom has been known to drown out collective madness in the end, which is still what makes the worst democracy better than the best dictatorship.
Democracy has always meant a strong people, not a strong government; a strong citizenry, not a strong republic. If that’s the case, then I’m hopeful that with the strengthening of the individual voice today we may yet survive our corrupt leaders and obscene dancers (not the strip-teasers, the Cha-cha-ers) and become a truly strong and free nation. The future doesn’t lie with them, they just know how to lie. It lies with:
You.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=40205
That Person of the Year is “You.” You, the individual reader, the individual person, the individual occupier of space on this planet, are Time’s choice as the one living being that had the greatest impact on the world this year. Traditional wisdom, which owes to Thomas Carlyle, says the history of the world is just the biography of great men. Not so, says Time. Or no longer so today.
“Look at 2006… 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….”
Thomas Friedman already noted this development in his 2002 book “Longitudes and Attitudes.” He posited that to understand 9/11, you had to understand the broad canvas behind it. That broad canvas was what was happening to the nation-state. Three things in particular, he said, had changed dramatically.
The first was the relation between nation-states. We have only one superpower left, which is the United States, which has to deal with a host of small nation-states. The second was the relation between nation-states and global markets, or economic globalization. And the third was the relationship between nation-states and individuals.
“Because globalization has brought down many of the walls that limited the movement and reach of people, and because it has simultaneously rewired the world into networks, it gives more power to individuals to influence both markets and nation-states than at any other time in history. Whether by enabling people to use the Internet to communicate instantly at almost no cost over vast distances, or by enabling them to use the Web to transfer money to obtain weapons designs that normally would have to be controlled by states … globalization can be an incredible force-multiplier for individuals. Individuals can increasingly act on the world stage directly, unmediated by the state.”
I myself have been writing about this from quite another perspective, which is the digital revolution. Its enormous impact I saw during Edsa People Power II. To this day, I maintain that one of the most critical factors that took Joseph Estrada out was the Filipino community abroad, which made their sentiments known through the e-mail and cellular phone. The volume of e-mail that landed in the Inquirer Online at that time was phenomenal. Unlike Edsa People Power I, which reduced the Filipinos abroad largely to spectators, Edsa People Power II elevated the Filipinos abroad to the status of active participants. That was so because of the new technology, which allowed them to take part in the dramatic events in this country in real time, or near-real time. They might as well have been here, if in virtual form.
That technology has made even more tremendous strides since then. The prediction that TV, communications and computers would soon merge has come true. Tomorrow is today, as witness the cellular phones that can receive TV signals and do computing work.
Since Edsa People Power II I’ve been repeatedly saying that the new technology will alter profoundly our concept of news -- and sooner than we think. Online News, in particular, has added whole new meanings to the word “interactive.” “News” is no longer an etched-in-tablet, handed-down-from-heaven, final word on the subject. It is something completely correctable -- and correctable almost as soon as it sees life online. You will get an instant reaction on it, from grateful or irate readers. What makes Wikipedia truly wondrous isn’t just that it is one colossal encyclopedia freely available to everyone. It is that its version of the “truth” can be changed anytime. In fact, it actively encourages readers to send additions and corrections to its entries.
I’ve been telling NGOs all this time that at no time has their work become more viable. Traditional sources of authority are being subverted every day by a technology that is allowing more and more people to have more say in how things are run, or ought to be run. Of course, that includes them: their own authority is being subverted by a technology that is allowing individuals with a computer and a telephone to unburden themselves of their 10 cents’ worth on any issue that takes their fancy.
The last suggests the downside to all this. As Time notes, “Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom” and “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.” And as Friedman suggests, you can use the Web as much to foment iniquity as end tyranny, as much to hatch terrorist plots as stop plots to mount dictatorships.
But I’m personally hopeful, and not a little excited, about democracy coming out ahead rather than behind from these developments. Democracy itself is like that, too: it allows crackpots, as much as sages, to have their say on how things ought to be. But collective wisdom has been known to drown out collective madness in the end, which is still what makes the worst democracy better than the best dictatorship.
Democracy has always meant a strong people, not a strong government; a strong citizenry, not a strong republic. If that’s the case, then I’m hopeful that with the strengthening of the individual voice today we may yet survive our corrupt leaders and obscene dancers (not the strip-teasers, the Cha-cha-ers) and become a truly strong and free nation. The future doesn’t lie with them, they just know how to lie. It lies with:
You.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=40205
posted by dqfan06 @ 3:41 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home