Joe Carrano (graf writer in our class) posted a great reaction to my insistence that you now have the tools to be broadcaster, to market yourself. Read his post http://jdropsjewels.blogspot.com/2008/10/market-yourself.html
His first reaction was that he is not a commodity. Yeah, that's right. Old hip-hop heads and many new underground heads would have resisted the notion. The way Rap has been commodified is not the example I mean.
I mean "Free your mind and you ass will follow" (George Clinton). Damn, click the link! This has its own Wikipedia entry. Emancipate yourselves with Web 2.0 is the charge in hip-hop. Youtube is just one avenue to play with, learn and explore the possibilities. Why is this imperative for college grads much less anybody? Well the big companies of the corporate world want to eventually control the Internet. For now, YOU own the Internet but you and I simply don't get what's possible. Check out Google's net neutrality position in the matter.
I went looking for something that explained what I mean a
lot better than my moment about marketing yourself. Maybe I should call it what TIME magazine called it in 2006 when they named YOU the person of the year. [ASIDE: Guess who is my pick for person of the year in 2008? O - O - O - Obama / O - O - Barack Obama!!! Or maybe Obama and Palin?? ARGGHH!]
But, uhm, back to the lecture at hand. Perfection is perfected, so I'm a let 'em understand (Snopp Doggy Dogg "Nuthin' But a G Thing"). I haven't been effective at letting you all in to what this Web 2.0 thing is all about. Check out this slice of the TIME Person of the Year article and read the whole thing by clicking the title.
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....America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. ... 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.
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.
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