The current issue of Time magazine flatters its readers with the conceit that 2006 was the year of the Ordinary Person. There is a small mirror on the cover, instead of the usual celebrity portrait, and a short editorial hymning the praises of “community and collaboration on a scale never seen before.” Blogs, MySpace, Wikipedia and YouTube, the most striking versions of the new online paradigm of “user-generated content”, are heralded as quiet revolutions of the new information age. An era in which, if you listen to the true believers, peer-to-peer networks will overturn temples of the hidebound corporate hegemons, weblogs hasten the end of the loathsome “mainstream media”, and a new era of digital freedom will sweep away hierarchies, isms and schisms, and generally make the world safe for democracy.
Hyperbole about the internet spreads across the internet like an amoeba. So it only took a few hours for thousands of online verdicts to attach themselves to this piece of midbrow pandering. Most were reflexively sceptical, doubtful that a well-established publication like Time could ever be wholly sincere in its praise of little people. Some criticism was humorous, some hysterical, and a small fraction added something new to the argument before the blogosphere moved on to its next morsel of ‘real-time’ news. And yet, by itself, the fate of the article illustrated the basic truth of Time’s premise. Technology has granted this generation of ordinary people an unprecedented degree of access to and interaction with the information that drives our heavily mediated views of the world.
Since crowds are involved, there is often more heat than light, and a lot of nonsense. As Time observes: “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 anyone who has read a serious weblog (‘blog’) for a few weeks will readily concede that many of them rival, and a few surpass the competition, both printed and broadcast. Because they can host 10,000 words as easily as 800, or 20 photographs instead of five, blogs can address their subjects in much greater detail, without increasing their printing or distribution costs. They can also draw on a wide community of like-minded readers who pursue leads, correct errors and provide remarkable quantities of highly specialised knowledge. Unsurprisingly, therefore, photographs of dead soldiers being brought back from Iraq were published at a website called The Memory Hole before they appeared in The New York Times. A few years ago, irregularities in the now notorious Diebold voting machines were announced online long before newspapers got around to the story. And when memos surfaced which allegedly showed that President George W. Bush had dodged service at the Texas Guard, bloggers were quick to point out that the supposedly typewritten memos could be reproduced with the default settings in Microsoft Word. CBS news, which had broadcast the story, was eventually forced into an embarrassing apology.
Wikipedia, the “the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit” currently has more than 1.5 million English entries. A recent study concluded that “the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.” This is usually cited as proof of failure, but Wikipedia is six years old. A decade ago who would have believed it possible, using only unpaid volunteers, to create an encyclopaedia that could rival the Britannica? Project Gutenberg, which aims to make a similarly free online library currently offers more than 20,000 books. These are remarkable achievements. Whatever their imperfections, they are evidence of how powerful the new technology can be when used creatively.
Beyond these, of course, there are many other possible uses of internet communities (ebay auctions, chat rooms, file sharing, open source software …) but there is one relatively unsung development that quite literally has the power to be world-changing. It is the emergence of online microloans at websites like kiva.org which allow anyone with a credit card to loan small amounts of money to people anywhere in the world. Ten dollars out of a request for $100, for example, to a farmer in Azerbaijan, or a shopkeeper in Togo. The Nobel prize was recently awarded to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank which have shown the difference these tiny sums of money can make to the world’s poorest people. Perhaps the growing interest in online microcredit schemes will build on this success.
So whether or not we are in the age in which ordinary people can make a difference-despite the obvious failure of this hope in places like Darfur and Iraq-there is always good news elsewhere in the world, often beyond our immediate view. People creating libraries and encyclopaedias for free, writing software that will cost nothing, helping less fortunate strangers to emerge from poverty. The virtual world has begun to shape the real one in several promising ways, driven by anonymous people who have begun to enjoy the thrill imagined communities that exceed the sum of their parts. Let’s hope more of that community spirit spreads into the real world this year.
