You’ve probably heard by now that you were Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2006. You got the award “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,” Time said.

The Internet has spawned Web 2.0, an infinitely expanding network of user-driven sites and services that will reorder society. The Web 2.0 you will network with other citizens and set about “wresting power from the few” and “change the way the world changes,” Time said.

The Web 2.0 you will not spend all your time posting videos of your long-haired Chihuahua on YouTube. Or filling out surveys about your Top 8 friends on MySpace. Or playing fantasy baseball. And certainly not Googling pictures of Eva Mendes.

Time’s essay explaining all this is as silly as any other attempt by a mainstream media outlet to make sense of the medium changing the way it does business. Mainstream media outlets think YouTube and MySpace are new kinds of Web content. But they are simply new, more popular ways of doing what the Web has always enabled people to do: Share information quickly, conveniently and cheaply.

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Free market forces have simply driven down the cost of bandwidth and computing power to the point where more and more people can do more things online. Nothing revolutionary there unless you lack a basic understanding of the creative power of a free market.

One wonders how Time’s editors felt when the mobile phone video of Saddam Hussein’s hanging hit the Web just hours after it happened. On one hand, the amateur videographer’s work is a perfect example of the amateur content provider. On the other, it can’t feel good to get scooped by someone equipped only with a RAZR and a modem.

When the Abu Ghraib photos hit in 2004, the media hailed the camera-wielding whistle-blowers. The sadistic, sickening pictures were broadcast and published incessantly by American media.

But the Saddam video wasn’t broadcast. It inspired only hand wringing over whether it was appropriate to post or even to watch such a thing. The man who made the recording has even been arrested, apparently, when he deserves an award instead.

If you oppose the death penalty, either in this case or in general, the video serves as a document of its brutality. If you support it, it shows the just end of an evil man. However you want to process it, the information exists and is free to be seen or ignored by each individual.

Information wants to be free — and it is a core American belief that, in all but the most extreme cases, it should be. We deposed Hussein to defend core beliefs and doing so is why we fight the war on terrorism.

How — or whether — we continue to fight will possibly be determined by the coming conflict between President Bush and the Democratic Congress and by how the conflict plays out in the media.

A scene from the recently broadcast second season of “Sleeper Cell” — the Showtime series that far surpasses any other television attempt to dramatize the war on terrorism — made me pessimistic about our civilization’s willingness to fight for survival.

The show’s terrorist mastermind is being tortured for information by a CIA agent, but he won’t break.

“I do things I hate myself for, and I blame you for that. All of you,” the CIA man says.

“You Americans care more about analyzing your guilt than achieving victory,” the terrorist replies. It’s hard to argue with that.

Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited. He can be reached at aaronkeithharris@gmail.com.