Egypt, The Age Of Disruption And The 'Me' In Media - HuffPo

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Egypt, The Age Of Disruption And The 'Me' In Media
Jose Antonio VargasSenior Contributing Editor, Huffington Post
Posted: February 7, 2011 09:33 AM

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A few months and seemingly a lifetime ago -- before the Oscar bait "The Social Network" hit theaters, before Time declared the Facebook cofounder and CEO "Person of the Year," before the Middle East and the Arab world were turned upside-down in a matter of weeks -- I asked Mark Zuckerberg what role he plays in what he's called "the Facebook movement." When he introduced Facebook as a platform in the spring of 2007, addressing a gathering of geeks and techheads in Silicon Valley, that was his pitch: Facebook was a movement.

"How do you see yourself in this movement?" I asked last fall. "Are you the leader of this movement?"

"No, I am not," he answered quickly. As is often the case, Zuckerberg spoke less of himself and more of the company he runs. "I think Facebook has taken on a leadership role to some extent," he said. "But we always think about it in the context of what's going on with the Internet and society in general."

We live in an era in which access to information -- to all forms of media -- is the most democratic that it's ever been. Think of Google, which in a span of 12 years has become synonymous with and inseparable from the Internet; of Wikipedia, the write-it-yourself encyclopedia, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. Think of YouTube, home to a plethora of user-generated videos, where a madman and a freedom fighter can carve out his or her own space; and Twitter, which is less of a social network and more an information network -- and arguably the most effective broadcast channel in the world, giving voice to anyone, anywhere, with a mobile or Internet connection. This ongoing shift is still very much in its infancy. YouTube reaches its sixth anniversary year later this week, on Feb. 14; the very first tweet was sent almost five years ago, on March 21, 2006.

But what's proving more consequential than access to information is our growing access to one another, human-to-human, enabled by the Internet and mobile tools. As the author Clay Shirky has consistently and presciently said: "We have historically overestimated the value of access to information and underestimated the value of access to one another." Enter Facebook. As the unprecedented directory of the world's people, it's the social-networking site most explicitly tied to our individual and collective identities -- a site where every private citizen has a public identity. I've been covering Facebook since 2007, as part of the beat I created for The Washington Post on how technology is changing politics. I often get asked, "Is Facebook good or bad for society?" I've always answered, "Well, who's using it?" Like so much of the social Web, Facebook is akin to a magnifying glass that at once exposes and studies human behavior: how we see ourselves, and, just as important, how we see each other. Of course, how it's used here in America may not the same way that it's being used in, say, India...

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More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jose-antonio-vargas/egypt-age-of-disruption-me-in-media_b_819481.html

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