Parabéns, você foi eleito/a a pessoa do ano segundo o TIME Magazine.
E, para minha sorte, esse fenômeno dos espaços de afeto na Internet é o assunto da minha dissertação sobre linguagens experimentais da arte na Internet e objeto diário do meu dayjob como consultora de usabilidade e arquitetura da informação.
Eu penso em nós (eu , você, e "os outros" = nós) o tempo todo. Finalmente a nossa mobilização coletiva, a imagem do nosso fluxo, a nossa máquina desejante foram reconhecidos pelo nossos esforços diários em alimentar esta invenção maravilhosa e viciante. Nós mudamos a rede (com ela e por dentro dela), transformamos a nossa relação com o conhecimento, inventamos novas maneiras de conhecer "o outro", criamos milhares de novos artistas conceituais com os youtubes e flickrs, estreitamos fronteiras, aumentamos o volume da voz política (e da estupidez também) e até ganhamos dinheiro com ela.
Não é a rede. Somos nós.
(P.S.: Alguns trechos da dissertação "Frágeis Conexões" estão postados nesse blog, aberto a comentários, que serão publicados junto com a dissertação como formato acadêmico. É inspirado no formato de Fragmentos de um Discurso Amoroso, de Roland Barthes)
*******
Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.
(...)
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.
(...)
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. (...)
