Every year Time’s Magazine awards the person of the year. In 2006, this person was by no surprise “me”. Well, not me as in “me Gry Hasselbalch”,  but “me” as in “me the web 2.0 user”. The award was an aknowledgement of the web 2.0 development and the excitement evolving around it.  A development where “I”, the average person, suddenly got the means to publish stories about myself and to build my online identity with images, texts “blurps!” etc. And boy were we  thrilled with the new ways of expressing ourselves?

See ME travelling! See ME with my new born baby! Hear my opinion about malls, lobsters and vitamins and politicians and tall buildings and cars with three weels! See here I am at the party, so happy, beautiful, loved by other people and OOOPS.. so drunk, picking my nose, blurbing out with my strong opinions in the wrong context.. hey stop taking those pictures….

Ok, so 2006 was the year of “me”, the year when we the “I” generation took the media and used it to its very limits to express ourselves. The public debate was rolling over its own borders of excitement over all the new possibilities that we suddenly had to express ourselves with:

Blogging, moblogging, youtube, SecondLife, myspace, Linkedin…uuhh nice….and twitter and jaikuu!!! and and and….

And then came 2008, the hang over year, the year of “OOPS” when “me” the average person suddenly realise what I actually put out there. Organisations, media and even politicians start talking about the responsible media use and user, about how we should think about what we put out there. Campaigns, regulations, codes of conduct, guidelines, recommendations….

And meanwhile the “I” generation are frantically trying to delete the blurps and pictures that do not quite fit into the picture of “me”

… Delete… damn  com’on… DELETE… hmmmm…..DEEEELEEEETE….

Suddenly we are no longer the “I-generation”, but the “ooops-generation”