|
.............
Date:
Sat, 10 March 2007 11:04 WesternIndonesiaTime
Subject:
Time Magazine's Person of the Year 2006, and My Small Mirror
|
Time's Person of the Year 2006: You
by LEV GROSSMAN
Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2006
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.
source: time.com
|
 |
|
 |
|
The desk has been occupied with a 14" Panasonic TV, so on early Desember 2006 I placed Herry's
PC monitor on the small table, while the CPU on the floor under the window.
|
|
My small mirror near the small table that seems like inspiring the Time Magazine's Person of the Year 2006.
|
Previously Time magazine used to choose certain person/s to become the Person of the Year, and placed
the figure's photo/s as the cover of the magazine. For the year 2006, Time magazine chooses no certain person/s, instead choosing everybody
as the Person of the Year 2006. It was reflected in the cover that was using the photo of a PC in which the monitor was printed with glossy silver
ink that could reflect anybody’s picture who views it, like looking at the mirror, although not so celar.
Such mirror like PC monitor on the cover was like inspired by my placing a PC computer in my bedroom on
early December 2006. Like written in my previous letter of "Some Busy Days with Herry Latief",
on 1 December 2006, my friend Herry Latief purchased a new PC computer and let me to bring it home to place in my bedroom.
My bedroom has no much space left. The desk that usually in other’s bedroom become the place for PC computer,
has been occupied by a 14" Panasonic TV set I bought on the day the Greek soccer team won the European Cup 2004.
So I had no other choice than to place the PC monitor on a small table, while the CPU placed on the floor.
Close to that small table was a small mirror, around 10 by 12 inches, on the floor leaning to the wall under
the window. I used the mirror to view my paintings from different angles.
A few weeks later Time magazine announces their unusual person of the year, this time the Person of the Year 2006
was "You", with the photo of a PC computer on the cover, in which the PC monitor was printed with glossy silver ink that could reflect
anybody’s face who views it.
When a few weeks later I searched for the related article about it, I found one with the writer’s name LEV GROSSMAN.
The work that I was doing that made Herry Latief purchased the PC for me was about the book of Mr. Asahan Aidit, the younger brother of the late DN Aidit,
a famous figure of Indonesian communist party in the sixties. Usually communist group is also known as the leftist, so the name of the writer for Time magazine's
Person of the Year 2006, Lev Grossman, was also like inspired by my activities working the book of a younger brother of the leftist.
Now the PC desktop computer has been moved to Herry's small shop in Kepu area, in the center of Jakarta. I consider Herry's PC
and my small mirror as having a historical moment related to Time magazine's unusual choice of Person of the Year 2006, the "You".
|
