On December 2, 2009 I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook.com and the developer of my.barackobama.com at an event that was organized by the Maryland Technology Council. He made a quite an impression on me. To be speaking with and listening to someone so young, intelligent and accomplished was inspiring. During his brief discussion he mentioned how the printing press, radio and television, which were tremendous forward leaps in communication and enhanced the frequency with which we communicate, had severe limitations. These limitations were based on the fact that few people controlled or generated what was communicated. I believe this is why we placed such trust in our news sources and we treated our news anchors as modern day oracles.
While Facebook.com was not the start of the current communications revolution, it is clearly at the center of it. The Web 2.0 world is now enabling every person with Internet access to be the generator of information. We are no longer beholden to a select few people for our news or any other information we may be interested in. There are no more Walter Cronkite’s of the world, not because traditional news sources don’t exist, but because we now have hundreds--even thousands--of choices of where we receive our news from. The power that was placed in the hands of so few for so long is now being distributed to everyone. The ability for everyone to communicate with everyone, benefits everyone. News being broadcast from its source by an eyewitness no longer has to be filmed, edited and narrated to us, it can come streaming right to our handheld or computer in an instant from its source. The transparency that has come about and continues to evolve because of this type of communication is changing how we interact with our families, our employers and even our governments, and how they interact with us.
As you have read in my earlier blogs, the Web 2.0 world is not one that an employer or a government should try to control. It is one that should be embraced. It is one that we should all participate in because transparency of information benefits all of us and is more important than control. It is empowering and liberating. The comfort an earlier generation drew from Walter Cronkite is not something future generations will need. We will draw comfort from the empowerment that has come about through Web 2.0 technologies and the variety, transparency and enhanced communication that it entails. As Sy Simms used to say, “an educated consumer is our best customer.” Well I think we can say an empowered person is our best citizen.
