Apple has got to be happy about this:

Image from Mac Daily News; alternate image from TIME here

The use of the iMac is not directly referential to the article; they simply had to use some computer, so they chose an iMac, probably for the simplicity of the appearance–though they over-painted the already-simple front-panel interface with a YouTube screen, used to indicate what you communicate over the World Wide Web. And as happy as I am that an Mac was chosen to represent the everyman’s interface with the web, I am even more pleased at the subject matter it represents.

I think that TIME made a fantastic choice here, though in the flowery prose and short storytelling, they do not explain the central point or theme all that well. They did run a story recently which also spoke to the heart of this issue but which also only described it peripherally. Maybe there’s an ink-and-paper version, or even an on-line one, which I am not seeing. But they do seem to be making a point here which I fully agree with, even if they are not making it clearly.

This is something of a special point to me, which I have blogged on before, about how the Internet is wonderfully subversive in that it opens up the potential for the individual to communicate to a world audience in a way never before possible. The main point is that before the Internet, communication was controlled by a very few people, a rarified “publishing class” to whom you had to genuflect in order to communicate with more than just a few hundred people in the world. The Internet bypasses the publishing class for the first time in history, and makes it possible for anyone to speak to the world based solely upon the strength of their message.

This is also one of the reasons I favor Network Neutrality so much: it keeps the playing field of communication relatively level and uncensored. Allow the Telecoms to control the Internet, and that becomes hobbled, with the average person’s voice suddenly becoming muted and leveraged, potentially even destroying the Internet as the free tool of communication I describe above and instead supplanting that new avenue of social discourse with simply yet another stripe of the publishing class, controlling what you say and taking tolls on yet another controlled and muted road.

Hopefully the Internet will stay what it is; the Democrats taking control of Congress, while not a guarantee, is a very good sign that it will. As such, the Internet is not a perfect answer; it is not a solution to the problem of unequal speech, but it is a step in the right direction. And any public celebration of that aspect of the Internet is something that I gladly welcome.