It’s 2007, and damning the man has never been easier. Not only can you say that President Bush is the next Hitler, you can tell it to 1 billion people – with accompanying pictures and videos. Protesting in general has gotten easier: you can literally pick one from a list. Movements can even happen entirely by internet – although nothing has quite the touch and finesse of a mob of protestors waving signs and screaming bloody murder. With the internet, though, these people have organized carpools, found places to stay, and blogged about the finer points of rioting tactics should, as they say, push come to shove. It kinda makes you wonder how those crazy kids from Alabama managed it back in 1963.   And we’re not just griping about things. The internet has taken down The Man on numerous occasions, at times being muchfaster than conventional media. The best example is the UCLA taser incident. A student in the library was tasered for (supposedly) refusing to leave because he lacked his student ID. This is a terrible thing to see, and one of the students who saw the incident wanted everyone to know what happened. He pulled out his videophone and took a video, which spread across the internet like wildfire. Public outcry and inquiry ensued.   Another huge example was the Mark Foley scandal. The whole thing was revealed by a normal guy – a page named Lane Hudson – on a blog. The evidence was a collection of e-mails and chats. Foley resigned five days – FIVE DAYS – after the blog first posted the e-mails.   And what about Abu Ghraib? The photos may not have been first released to the internet, but they became infamous through the internet community. Most of the major scandals of late – including Jack Abramhoff and Enron – involved incriminating e-mails surfacing and being plastered all over the web. The internet has turned everyone into watchdogs; we’re all keeping an eye on the Man.   It’s more than just just fact-checking the actions of the powerful; we’re writing a good chunk of history ourselves. Just take a look at Wikipedia: it’s currently the largest reference website on the internet. And every entry, every word was made by – you guessed it – anyone with some spare time and a computer. Here’s an amazing fact: the Encyclopedia Britannica has 122,264 articles. Wikipedia currently contains 1,583,954 articles, or 13 times that number. And I’ll bet the EB entry on World of Warcraft isn’t nearly as thorough.   It’s the power of numbers; every person pitches in just a little bit, and eventually blogs become reliable news sources, and can be much faster and pertinent than CNN. The blog Houston’s Clear Thinkers by Tom Kirkendoll was one of the most respected news sources out there on the Enron trial, and Kirkendoll, a local attorney, wrote it for kicks in his spare time.   Blogs by servicemen have changed the way we do war: Vietnam was a landmark war because the media followed the troops. Just Another Soldier (www.justanothersoldier.com) became one of the most significant reports of the war. In the Iraq War, the media IS the troops. Mil-blogs give us a more in-depth look on war than was ever possible, and everyone can be held accountable. For a taste, try one of these two.   And it’s not just the news: entertainment has been just as affected. How many of us use our leisure time to read – not a magazine, but blogs like www.dooce.com? Blogs have become our own personal journals/radio stations, and there’s something fascinating about reading someone’s journal. In photography, too, some of the best photos on the web were taken by amateurs and posted on Flickr. Even secrets have become and art form, with PostSecret becoming a huge hit. The real explosion, however, is video: who hasn’t spent hours watching clips on YouTube?       Here’s a fun trick: go to YouTube and find your favorite video. Maybe you dream of performing the Evolution of Dance; the Shoes guy/girl turns you on. Perhaps you secretly pine after lonelygirl15, or the dog attacking his own leg makes you laugh so hard you pee your pants.   Next, look at how many times your clip has been viewed. Take that number, and multiply it by $6.50, the average price of a movie ticket in the U.S. (Comm. Studies people, stay with me here.) Then go to a site like this one that lists off every movie of 2006 and see how your number compares to the Total Gross. What you’re comparing is how many times the movies were seen this year compared with your pick. If you chose The Evolution of Dance (YouTube’s most popular video), then you’re in luck: it was viewed nearly 38 million times, making it viewed more than almost any major motion picture all year. Only the second Pirates movie did better.   What’s happening? A transition of power to the people on a scale the world has never seen. It’s not about money, it’s not about credentials. Just about everyone doing this stuff on the internet does it for absolutely free. Why? Do we really believe some random blogger’s biased opinion more than the experts? Well, yeah.   It’s a revolution. We simply don’t care about the people on top anymore. They’ve lost touch with us; celebrities just aren’t real people anymore. (See Michael Jackson, Branjelina, Paris Hilton, Jessica Simpson, Tom Cruise, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, or pretty much anyone on the cover of the Enquirer.)   The Man has officially lost our trust. The government lies, big companies rip us off, and Fox News reads like an action movie preview. We don’t care what they think anymore. Ordinary people may not be experts, but at least they don’t have an agenda. If telling the facts is about making money, it can’t be truly real.   People don’t want Martha Stewart, we want Crash Test Kitchen. Real people. Real lives. People we can care about, who care about us. I’d rather hear a soldier’s blog describe the war as he sees it than listen to Tony Snow pussyfoot his way through another press conference.   So think outside the box. Don’t get your news from CNN: read a blog instead. Watch YouTube instead of TV. Wikipedia something. And never miss an opportunity to give power to the people: it’s as easy as point and click. Do you have a crush on lonelygirl15? Tom does too.E-mail him at t-cohlmia@northwestern.edu.