Congratulations to us.
I'm not generally a big fan of the Time magazine and I rarely agree with their person of the year. However, I bought the magazine this year because I liked the cover, I thought it was a good idea. Instead of the traditionnal picture of the man of the year, they put a "mirror" on the cover, and a big YOU.
The article is right on many points. I like the idea that the great men from yesterday now have to work together. In other words, the great men don't exist anymore, or we are all a great man together.
However, as Grossman says in the end : "Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail." This technology is very new for everyone and we are now enjoying the good parts of it. At the same time, I'm sometime afraid of what the Web 2.0 could become, and we had an example in the readings this week.
If I agree to say that thanks to people posting of sorts of videos on Youtube, we may be exposed to information that would never be given in the traditional media (the Taser case is an example), I don't really like the fact that everyone tend to consider himseld or herself a journalist or a photograph or whatever. It's the same problem that I described with Wikipedia a few weeks ago. Everyone is not a specialist, everyone is not a journalist, and making a video does not automatically mean delivering some good information.
Videos are easy to manipulate (and I don't mean to manipulate on the computer with a program), and the truth can be easily "worked on". That does not mean that people should not photograph or film what they see, it's often very interesting, but viewers should not trust ALL the things that they see. The example of the Lonelygirl is a good one. If here, it's not very dangerous and funnier than everything else, it's an example of someone manipulating thousands of people making them believe that they really watch a video blog. If something like that happens in another field (politics...), it woul be much more problematic.