Elanso

Person of the Year: You
(1) 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.

1. attribute to v.归因于
2. Thomas Carlyle 卡莱尔(英国作家Carlyle Thomas,1795-1881,生于苏格兰)
British historian and essayist whose works, such asThe French Revolution (1837), are characterized by his trenchant social and political criticism and his complex literary style.
卡莱尔，托马斯：(1795-1881) 英国历史学家和散文作家，其著作，如《法国革命》 （1837年），以对社会和政治的犀利批评和复杂的文风为特色

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 didn't make enough PlayStation3s.

1. disturbing adj.烦扰的
2. bloody adj.血腥的, 嗜杀的, 有血的,
3. entrench : To fix firmly or securely:确立，使处于牢固地位：
——entrenched adj.确立的，不容易改的（风俗习惯）
4. skirmish n.小冲突 v.进行一场小冲突

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. 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. （2）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.

1. collaboration n. 协作, 通敌
2. scale：A standard of measurement or judgment; a criterion.
3. compendium n.纲要, 概略
4. metropolis n. A major city, especially the chief city of a country or region.

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.

Hype n.<美俚> 皮下注射, 骗局,大肆宣传,大做广告,瘾君子

And we are so ready for it. We're 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.

predigest vt.预先消化, 简化
rumple v.弄皱, 弄得乱七八糟 n.皱纹, 皱褶