Crowds are TIME’s “person” of the year

Crowdsourced, networked, distributed media

TIME Magazine used its “Person of the Year” to celebrate “the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter,” a phenomenon explained by a combination of emergence and “dumb” networks theory, and an awareness of the ubiquity of media generation and publishing tools.

The magazine article is woefully superficial, but it does provide a colorful parade of characters selected to represent some of the larger sites and avenues for crowdsourcing and collaboration (MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon.com, OhMyNews, digital vidcams and podcasting, to name most of the big ones).

Implications for journalism? That news sites should continue exploring and enabling community and collaboration. Think of the relatively new verbs in our vernacular: to FaceBook, to podcast, to blog, to camcord.

That people want raw feeds in addition to edited content, and the ability to edit themselves. They want immediacy, and they want to be able to react to what they are seeing and reading. To the pre-filters (desk and page editors, copyeditors), media must enable post-filters (a place to post, to discuss, to question and correct).

The impression the lead TIME story leaves is that “Great Man” theory is dead. Where once we hailed great man inventions like Edison’s light bulb or Bell’s telephone or Ford’s car, in 2007, can anyone tell me who invented the iPod? No “one” did; many collaborated to pull it off. Who checkmated CBS into admitting the Memogate story had gaping holes? No “one”; many blogged the network into submission.

Exciting times.