How to measure Greatness

Greatness

There is excellence and then there is greatness-cosmic, transcendent, Einsteinian greatness. We know it when we see it, but the question remains how do we measure it? What makes a person great? What separates the great from the merely good?

Some shook the world by arriving: Gandhi at the sea to make salt, Yuri Gagarin in Space. Others by refusing to depart: Rosa Parks from her bus seat, “the Unknown Rebel” in Tiananmen Square. There were those who inspired awe, who could make freedom radiate through walls of a Birmingham jail, a South African prison or a Nazi concentration camp. Others engineered machines that could fly and machines that could think, conquered infections and discovered the molecules that form the basis of life. There were people who could inspire us with a phrase, frighten us with a word, or revise the universe with an equation.

Regardless they all had one thing in common. They were great. They achieved that elusive trait which seemed to evade the majority of the population for so long. And yet when we think of great people, very few are from our modern era. So I must ask, is it a case that great men are no longer needed, or is it a case that in our world or interdependence, “greatness” is no longer simply an individual trait. Have great men been replaced by a collective greatness?

Certainly, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disconcerting things that are occurring around us. There is no foreseeable end for the conflict in Iraq as it becomes more and more entrenched. Vicious skirmishes continue to erupt between Israel and Lebanon. A war drags on in Sudan. Nuclear proliferation is becoming more widespread. The threat of nuclear war hovering above, dictating almost all global actions. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming.

But look at our modern world through a different lens and you’ll discover another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. Where “greatness” is no longer rare, and no longer constituted by an individual. Because great men are no longer needed. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never experienced before. It’s about the universal compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the people’s mass media You Tube and the online metropolis Bebo. It’s about the many wrestling power from the few and empowering the powerless, giving a voice to the voiceless. This will not only change the world, but also change the way in which the world itself changes, in which the world view “greatness”.

I believe that the tool that has made this possible is the World Wide Web. It has enabled those who would have otherwise been engulfed, forgotten by the history shine. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together seventeen years ago, according to Wikipedia, as a way for scientists to share research. It’s not even the over hyped dotcom Web of the late 1900s. The new Web is a very different thing. It’s tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter: creating a universal “greatness”, defining it for our generation. Silicon Valley calls it web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But really it’s a revolution.

And we are ready for it. We’re read to balance our diet of pre-digested prejudiced news with raw feeds from Baghdad, Beijing and Boston. We can learn more about how the citizens of the world live just by looking at the backgrounds or You Tube videos than we ever could have from watching hundreds of hours of network television.

And we don’t just watch, we participate, like never before. We, every individual, get the chance to take part in what constitutes “greatness”. We make Face book profiles and Second Life avatars and review books at Amazon and trade goods on EBay and record pod casts on iTunes. We blog about our political candidates losing and write songs about lost loves. We record footage or war torn countries and build open-source software.

The world may love it’s solitary geniuses- it’s Einstein’s, it’s Edison’s, its Eisenhower’s, but those isolated dreamers may have to learn to play with others. In a world where global communication is an everyday occurrence, every individual now not only has the opportunity, but the responsibility to be great. Car companies are running open design contests, CNN is carrying blog posting alongside its regular news feed, Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux, we’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into global intellectual economy.

“Greatness” can finally be achieved by everyone. 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, “greatness” belongs to each and every one of us. Sure, it’s a mistake to romanticise all this any more that is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harness the stupidity of the crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on You Tube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the bigotry and the naked hatred and racism.

But that’s what makes all this worthy of commentary. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There’s no road map for how an organism that’s not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It’s a chance for people to inspire others, to reach out and make a difference, to exalt “greatness”. For “greatness”, is no longer simply a quality for “great men”. To me, in the Twenty first century “Greatness” is symbolised by interdependence, inter-reliance and by a world in which “great men” are rendered redundant and obsolete, as every man, regardless of race, religion or creed, has the opportunity to be great.