Check yo' seff!

A good article from Brian Williams, the latest, greatest news anchor.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570800,00.html

Some context: This was printed as part of "Time" magazine's "person of the Year" issue, which crowned YOU (yes, you) as 2006's big boy/girl. Why? The premise has something to do with the fact that "Web 2.0" -- the blogging, YouTubing, personalized, me-first web world -- allows for any individual with a keyboard and a webcam to expose whatever he/she wants (thoughts and more) to the rest of the world, giving a worldwide reach of personal expression to each one of us and opening up 'uge new possibilities of e-commerce.

What Brian gets at in the article: Get over yourself!
- If the only news you get is from the venue giving the ideology of your choice
- If you (honestly) think the rest of the world wants to hear why you changed your hairdo
- If you just have to blog 3 pages on today's workplace drama, without thinking of who could see that drama down the road...
- If your iTunes downloads surround you with a cocoon of sound that disallows musical exploration of new genres or the cheery sound of chirping birds while you run
... maybe you should consider stepping back into the world around you, and considering that maybe YOU are not the single most important entity on the planet.

Brian adds much more breadth and convincing argument; give it a read. He's not coming down on technology and the Information Age -- he's just letting us know that there's still a world around us-- people dying (for real), suffering, policy decisions to be made on basis of more than your tailor-made media outlet. In the end, you're a citizen of the world, and you should never let these wonderful technologies undermine the reality that there are several billion other ordinary people outside yourself that may be deserving of Person of the Year!

Disclaimer: In the writing of this post, I confess that I was taking advantage of Web 2.0. And yes, it's all part of KLIM's and my effort to up the JuntoBlog's readership. We're shameless pluggers for JuntoBlog. You might call us the Men of the Year, directly conflicting with Mr. Williams' premises. But we know the world around us; indeed, we run without iTunes headphones!