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December 18, 2006
TIME person of the year
By now, everyone has probably heard that the TIME "Person of the Year" is "you": people who are using the Internet and other information technologies. Rather than looking for the one or few individuals who changed the world, TIME choose to tell a different story:
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 guts of this selection isn't just the people or the technology. It is about how the rules of the innovation game have changed:
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.
The old saying is "two heads are better than one." The new reality multiplies that by a factor of n. This is not to say that all collaborations and group efforts are useful or even wise. Remember "group think"? But the power of groups has always been important. What has been changing is how that power is harnessed: in individuals acting as a collective (tribes, families, governments, corporations, other organizations, etc.); in an agglomeration of individual interactions, aka markets; or in ad hoc, free flowing collaborations.
In every era, new technologies, including social technologies, allow for new sets of individual interactions. These new ways of interacting open up new opportunities and new problems. As TIME has recognized, the 21st Century is beginning to look like the era of collaboration. We are beginning to see both the opportunities (e.g. wikipedia, open source) and the problems (e.g. spam, privacy, piracy, acceleration of rumors and false information). How we deal with both will define the I-Cube Economy well into the future.
Posted by Ken Jarboe at December 18, 2006 1:45 PM
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