I probably shouldn’t be stunned that the LARGEST number of links and blog discussions I’ve yet seen on Techmeme were when Time magazine set their "Person of the Year: You".
For most of us in the Web 2.0, internet and participation culture (the basis of my Rise of the Participation Culture report), most of what this article said was obvious since we’re living it. The important thing, however, is that the mainstream press is bringing it to the attention of the masses who are still amazingly clueless.
A year and a half ago I was talking to a C-level executive at a company about blogging, podcasting and virtual worlds. I admitted that the virtual world thing was a little far out…but then he looked at me and said, "What’s blogging?" This man headed marketing.
It wasn’t until BusinessWeek did a cover story on Second Life that senior executives and my close colleagues and friends stopped looking at me like I was some technoweenie goofball out of touch with reality or far too strategic to be practical.
To see participants (i.e., bloggers) participate in the Time magazine discussion seems appropriate, but if you read some of the perspectives it proves how people leap into the discussion and mold, shape and change public discourse. At least I hope the Time magazine folks are reading bloggers writings as I have. Some…not all…of bloggers’ perspectives have deepened my understanding of what Time published.
Friday evening I was at a gathering where two people (my wife was one of them) vociferously railed against the alleged inaccuracies of Wikipedia and "all those bloggers whose opinions I don’t care about" intimating that all of us out here were just ill informed spewers of opinion with little regard to facts.
Others there didn’t seem to see much import to the whole participation thing. During the discussion, I politely pointed all those places where I begged to differ, but realized that these people were still up in the stands watching (instead of on the field playing like we who participate) and are distracted and only peripherally watching the game. Unfortunately, these are people who are involved in trend, marketing, product and service ideations (though all 40+ so maybe it was age-related) and should’ve been right next to me pushing on the membrane of the future instead of fearing it or minimizing its import.
So it’s good to see bloggers react like this but then all of us — those who "get it" and those yet to — need to understand that 98% of the world is still unaware, doesn’t care, sees it as noise and inefficiency instead of what it is: connecting humankind to the next level of social, fun, creativity, problem solving and efficiency. Just like the train, car, and airplane transported our bodies, the internet is transporting our minds.
After yesterday’s Google post about them in a position for mass harvesting of data that can be monetized and/or learned from, I had an interesting experience today that’s illustrative of how anonymous we are — or aren’t — today on the ‘net.
Steve’s Social Stuff