I've never liked those "greatest moments" countdowns that cable channels love to run, but even sillier is the Webby Awards' "10 Web moments that changed the world." Can the Web be said to really have "moments"? I mean, you can make the argument that "a great TV moment" is something that can exist (at least in the past) because you had lots of people all tuned in at one time, watching something more or less live, like the Moon landing, the M*A*S*H final episode, or the premiere episode of Manimal. You know, some event that bonds us all together in some transient facsimile of a community, and thus these "great moments" become communal events. But the Web doesn't operate like that (and TV may not operate like that for much longer either); it's a serial medium in which people access it piecemeal at random times.
Anyway, the list really is a set of colossal reaches. The dot-com boom and bust? Can something that took place over six years really be considered a "moment"? "September 11th"? "Millions of Americans Turn to the Internet for Information About the Tragedies." Millions more turned to TV and even newspapers. So what? "Asian Tsunami"--"Citizens Journalists Are the First on the Scene to Document the Tsunami." Huh?
And if these are truly the greatest Web moments, then I'm getting offline now and moving to the Unabomber's cabin.
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