It's time to rejoice. YOU -- and everyone else -- are the Time's prestigious Person of the Year. And for the first time, you have gate crashed into the elite category of its former recipients, all great men and women of the stature of John F Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill and many others who were the movers and shakers of the world. By cold logic, it means You were a very important person in 2006, beating George Bush, Saddam Hussien, Manmohan Singh, Okram Ibobi and their ilk in the sweepstakes for power.

So celebrate. Celebrate even if you haven't flipped through a copy of Time in your life, much less bought it from the newsstand while commuting to work. The good news is, that's not something to feel apologetic about. In the brave new world of Web 2.0, you don't need the tactile feel of paper, the dull static content, the stale news of 5 minutes ago -- all of which are the characteristics of the old media. Now we can read the content of Time for all we care, or any other news provider, by visiting its website from the comfort of our bedroom without ever stepping out to get a hard copy of the news magazine.

Our sense of power - and now participation -- in the media space doesn't end there. We can do much more than simply accept all the printed words in the media as the Biblical truth. We can blog about what we have read, agree or disagree with it, call the reporter who wrote it idiot or eulogise the one whose world views coincides with ours. If we are more proactive and have the simple tools at our command - which most of us do nowadays--like a digital camera, then we can even give the professional news gatherers a run for their money by uploading instant and unmediated content in the form of pictures, commentaries, videos and what not -- and much faster than them. It is the acknowledgement of this new-found power of the net users and their ability to generate interesting and realistic content for the web that has made You the Time's Person of the Year. Welcome to the age of democratisation of news, 24x7 where citizen journalists dictate the agenda of news.

But don't get overexcited yet. All the power of the internet will come to naught if we sit idle on our couch and fail to harness it to our advantages. And on that count we are pathetically behind the expectation. The million dollar question which is not Time-tested is: How many Manipuris are net savvy and active on the World Wide Web? Even among those who can be considered regular users of the net, I suspect those who blog, participate in online discussion forums, contribute to open source content websites like Wikipedia, YouTube, etc. are in the minority. As e-pao would testify, we are more of Chat warriors than being an Andrew Sullivan. This holds true more in Manipur, where the internet connectivity is painfully slow and concentrated mostly in Imphal. If you add the problem of power cuts, then you can say the state is a no-internet-zone. The point is, considering our dismal lack of access to the internet, Time's conferring on everybody the Person of the Year is a bit rich.

I am not talking about the Manipuris only though we are more alienated from the web than most of the people in the West. Even in the US, only 8 percent -- about 12 million -- keep a blog, according to a recent survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Of those bloggers, 84 percent blog as a "hobby" or say it's "not something I spend a lot of time on." Another survey echoes the same indifference of the internet users to what is called community driven web: only 26 percent of all Internet users had ever shared personal material such as "artwork, photos, stories, or videos online."

My purpose in pointing this out is not to detract from the potential of internet. Personally, I believe in the ability of the internet to contribute to the process of democracy and even a revolution, a bloodless one at that. That's why my first choice for a public airing of my humble views remains the e-pao.net, not a Manipur Mail or a Sangai Express.

Those of us in Manipur and elsewhere lucky enough to have access to the internet should realise that we have a powerful tool for self expression, a forum for dissent, an opportunity to change the direction in which the Manipuri society is heading, click by click, blog by blog.

We don't have a critical mass of internet surfers, all right; but it's not the quantity but quality that matters. I wish to see the day when the Chief Secretary of Manipur decides to run a blog and reveal the murky goings on in the Cabinet Secretariat through it. I wish to read blogs maintained by ministers spilling the beans of wrongdoing by their colleagues. I want the accusations, insinuations and counter allegations to fly thick and fast between them through their blogs. It will be great fun seeing skeletons tumble out of the closets of the powers that be, with details of percentages and cuts in recruitments, contracts, transfers and postings business all disclosed in web postings after postings. All these will take place in the cyber domain, safe in the knowledge of anonymity. For example, should the present Chief Secretary Jarnail Singh want to blog, he may not necessarily christen his online diary as Jarnail's Journal (pun intended); the Governor can play around with words a bit and set up a blog called His Honourable Blog and so on. If the web 2.0 is your sword, than the anonymity it offers is your shield. Rebel leaders too can ambush the blogosphere and use it to feel the pulse of public opinion without the ignominy of interacting with the hoi polloi.

It's not the high and the mighty's blogs that can bring about the real revolution version 2; it's the ordinary bloggers -- what Glen Reynolds of Instapundit fame calls an army of Davids -- that can transform the landscape of socio-political discourse in Manipur. As we are all aware, free press is a myth in Manipur; it doesn't exist. Editors of local newspapers get killed, kidnapped and warned. For the people on the street like you and me, letting out a sincere note of dissent is a risky business. So we go to our shells, avoid giving vent to our ideas, hoping for a day when we can articulate them in a free and fair environment.

Now that safe forum has arrived at our fingertips. The challenge is in tapping it. I have a simple solution, and it is: Let's all be whistleblowers where we are at our own level -- in our workplaces, in the corporate boardrooms, at the municipal councils, at the NGOs where we work, at the Universities, at the hospital, at the recruitment board, at the PWD office….and expose the loot and the graft that is taking place everywhere in our once beautiful state. Through blogs. Let us mount sting operations on bribe takers and givers armed with nothing more than a camera phone and a blogspot account in which to flash their names and webcast the figures of booty exchanged. Let thousand mutinies bloom. Through blogs.

We need not worry about the consequences for nobody can retaliate against a nameless faceless cyber identity. In the worst case scenario, you may receive some hate mails, but they can't touch a hair of yours.

My faith in the internet is not an unqualified one though. I don't believe that every blogger will always tell the truth; we all have our biases, prejudices and often vested interests. But it is important that we give every individual the right and power to bring them out of their mental blocks. The cyber activism of which I am quite optimistic will no doubt also be a purveyor of sinister half truths, but it will also help promote dissent, which is the cornerstone for developing a healthy democracy. For what is democracy without YOUR voice; and it's not necessary that YOU are always right. What is truth anyway? I don't want to go into all the academic debate about post modernism, but no one has the ultimate claim on truth.

In that sense, the web is a great leveller. Through it we can stop what Naom Chomsky terms as the Manufacture of Consent by the powerful sections of the society. We can define the Reality and not the Projected Reality that we are led to believe. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, a celebrated media theorist, thinks that the opinions of the majority force those in minority to conceal their own view points. Not any more. In the cyber realm, you have nothing to feel embarrassed about or fear about being overwhelmed by the mob since you remain a cyber creature. Spiral of Silence has had its best days. Such is the power of the Internet.

That's why I prefer a Google's Person of the Year any day than a feel-good epithet showered on YOU by an ageing media house.

But where have YOU all gone? Come on, bring it on.