Walter Lippman, in his 1914 book called “Drift and Mastery,” warned that civilization was becoming so complex that “the purchaser can’t pit himself against the producer, for he lacks knowledge and power to make the bargain a fair one.”

Knowledge is shifting back. Power is following.

The most powerful, top-down American magazine of the last century took note of this shift on its current cover. By naming “You” as its Persons of the Year, Time magazine was acknowledging, if not celebrating, the way modern communications and collaboration technologies have empowered people to regain some element of power over their own lives.

I wish the designation had gone to “Us” — all of us — instead of “You” because the latter reflects the magazine’s traditional, royal thinking. Mass media organizations, in their lecture mode of the past, told us what they felt we needed to know, and in many cases, like Time, pretty much told us what we should think about it, too. Our role: We bought it or we didn’t.

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In the conversational mode of media that is emerging, our role is quite different. So putting the people of the year “out there” somewhere, Time was in a sense reserving its “we the deciders of what is news” role, still inside the gates of authority.

It’s a relatively small quibble, because the cover story and supporting articles did, for the most part, capture the fundamental trends that are causing such an uproar in many parts of society, media high among them. But for all the changes the media have already seen, the biggest transition is still ahead of us.

In a world of conversational media, the professionals recognize that the people who once were just an audience collectively know more, vastly more, than the journalists — and that this is an opportunity to do better journalism, not a threat.

In this world, traditional media people welcome bloggers and other “citizen media” types and, naturally, try to co-opt the best ones. The ecosystem expands, and we all get better information in the end.

But not without messiness: The transition is already exposing fault lines in the business model that supported quality journalism in the latter half of the 20th century, as advertising revenues are separated from the actual journalism by businesses, such as eBay, that do a better job for advertisers and customers alike. That competition is more relevant to the future of newspapers and magazines than the journalistic competition, at least so far.

One thing we know about legacy businesses, though, is that they can be resourceful when pushed. And the traditional journalism business has some advantages even now, notably its cash flow and — despite the often-deserved criticism that should be seen as healthy, not scary — often high quality.

This is a time of great experimentation by media organizations, not just fear and loathing of the future. Blogs and podcasts by staff journalists are a start, but only that. Only when the media involve the audience in the journalism does it get truly interesting — and the examples of this, such as The Washington Examiner’s WECAN test, are too few.

There have been notable failures, as there should be when people experiment. The Los Angeles Times’ suffered a mini-debacle with a wiki editorial that invited the community to be editors. Online vandals trashed the thing, because the paper didn’t exercise the proper oversight. But the real failure was that the newspaper didn’t jump right back on the horse after falling, not the fall itself.

Much more successful was the Fort Myers News-Press invitation to its readers to help solve a puzzle about rising water and sewer rates — a plea that produced all kinds of useful information for an investigative series that led to lowered assessments. Now that is community journalism at its finest.

The most intriguing experiments are, I believe, yet to come. Some will be done via a hybrid model. New York University Professor Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net experiment (for which I’m an advisor) aims to work with traditional media people on new kinds of collective journalism. I, and many others, am also working on a variety of projects in this arena. The failures will outnumber the successes, but we’ll learn from them.

Will Time ever play this multiplayer game? Let’s hope so.

Let’s look forward to the day when Time and other traditional magazines fully embrace Us when it comes to the journalism. And let’s hope it happens sooner than later.

Dan Gillmor is a member of The Examiner Blog Board of Contributors and is director of the Center for Citizen Media.