考博英语作文话题之一：网民当选时代2006年度人物

文章作者 100test 发表时间 2007:02:25 12:56:58
来源 100Test.Com百考试题网

　　Times Person of the Year: You

　　The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

　　To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didnt make enough PlayStation3s.

　　But look at 2006 through a different lens and youll see another story, one that isnt about conflict or great men. Its a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. Its about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel peoples network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. Its 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. 来源：www.examda.com

　　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. Its not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. Its 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 its really a revolution.

　　And we are so ready for it. Were ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.来源：www.examda.com

　　And we didnt just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

　　America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. Were looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and its 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, Im not going to watch Lost tonight. Im going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? Im going to mash up 50 Cents vocals with Queens instrumentals? Im 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, TIMEs Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

　　Sure, its a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. 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. 来源：www.examda.com

　　But thats what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. Theres no road map for how an organism thats not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. Its a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder whos out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us youre not just a little bit curious.