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. —Person of the Year: You (Time)
This is a kind of milestone, in that a mainstream print magazine assumes that its target readers are not only users but creators of the internet.
I’m not so sure I like the use of the word “camcordered.” but otherwise this is a welcome article.
Of course there are still consumer drones out there, ready to follow the pied pipers of Madison Avenue whither they might lead. And the internet is not really ubiquitous enough that we can ignore issues of class and accessibility, but the article speaks to the potential of the creative commons and the two-way web.
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I have sort of hedged my bets by doing academic work on blogs as a subject. I'll know blogs will truly be accepted in academia if and when we stop giving them special treatment, and instead think of them as a core activity of the intellectual life. And before that happens, blogs will probably mutate into something very different. That's part of the reason why the 4Cs special interest groups on blogs and wikis merged into a single group -- "Blogs, Wikis, and Emerging Social Software."
By the time you are ready for tenure, Eric, I hope there will be more faculty members who know the blogosphere because they have used it, and who recognize good academic work in whatever form the peer review process takes.
Dennis:
I agree with your comments. This is indeed a historic occasion for recognition of the web as an important force in shaping society. Each person creates shared content for readers. In addition, newspapers and magazines may find that they need to open their pages to freelancers in order to stay in business. As you mentioned, "a mainstream print magazine assumes that its target readers are not only users but creators of the internet." Do you think that colleges will begin to accept online (blog or wiki writing) as scholarly work across disciplines?