• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, May 1, 2009

Let's begin by talking about some human beings. They are, after all, what this media thing is all about.  We sometimes lose sight of that. We get so caught up in the process of what we do that we forget it is about connecting people. Connecting people to content. Connecting people to brands. And increasingly, connecting people to each other.

I think our biggest problem has been one of orientation. For the past couple hundred years of media, it's been about connecting one-to-many, or one-to-some. Then this new personalized world of media sprung up on us, and we're really not sure what to do about it. Or more importantly, what it's doing to us.

We even talk about it in decidedly non-human ways. We call people things like "consumers," "targets," "markets," "users," etc., because we feel the need to classify and objectify them. But the reality is much of what we do is designed to de-humanize people, when what we should be doing is the exact opposite. "We have met the enemy," Pogo once opined, "and he is us."

I'm not sure I really understood that line until I started thinking about the way the media industry has been reacting and adapting to the shift to micromedia, social networking, the semantic Web, and especially, the loss of centralized control. But now I think I do understand that we are our own worst enemies, and that the answer is simply to start thinking like human beings.

Sure, we all talk about that. We spend a great deal of time, money and resources trying to understand that, but we sometimes fail to assimilate it because the very processes we use to objectively understand how humans think, feel and behave, ironically ends up dehumanizing us. We dwell in a world of B-to-B, and B-to-C, when the world has actually shifted to C-to-C, or even more dramatically, to C-to-B.

That brings me to the focus of this month's issue, which is all about human beings, including one that we're naming our Media Person of the Year: Maksim Rogov (aka "The Installer"). Okay, so Rogov isn't just any consumer. He is president of Nullriver, a software development firm that spawned "The Dev Team," the development team that wrote the Installer.app, which essentially hacked the iPhone and spawned a revolution in the way people use, create, disseminate and exchange applications-based media. And, if you agree with us, changed everything about the world of media in the process.

Let me talk about another human being for a moment, Josh Lovison, the guy who wrote the profile on Rogov. We editors at Media magazine were kind of stuck on this year's pick, because unlike past years in which a dominant figure jumped to mind, nobody stood out as the media world's central hero figure over the past 12 months. We toyed with a number of candidates ¬- including a key anti-hero, Sam Zell - but it was all those Apple iPhone commercials that kept us thinking something bigger was going on here. I mean who would've thought that someone would come up with a way to turn a phone into, well, just about anything you want it to be. At first we thought Steve Jobs, but almost immediately rejected that idea, because we selected Jobs as our first MPOTY in 2005 largely on the merits of the iPhone and iTunes, which truly were his inspiration.

It was over dinner that Josh explained the history of the Dev Team to me, and how it unleashed a revolution of which the Apple App Store is only the first seminal wave. So that's how Rogov became the hero of our app story, and becomes only our fourth MPOTY, following Steve Jobs, Al ("Inconvenient Truth") Gore, and Stephen Colbert, into the pantheons of Media magazine history.

Oh, and one disclaimer about Josh: When he's not writing MPOTY profiles, penning MediaPost's Gaming Insider, or serving as head of the Mobile and Gaming practices at Interpublic's Emerging Media Lab, he's also my nephew. Which either proves or disproves certain theories about genetics. I'd like to tell you I taught him everything he knows, but he keeps teaching me things I need to know.