I don’t usually read Wired magazine, because (a) it’s terminally hip and I’m not; (b) it’s so confoundedly geeky that half the time I don’t know what they’re talking about; and (c) being as hip as they are, they insist on doing totally obnoxious layouts with fluorescent orange inks and other tricks that make the page almost unreadable.

HOWEVER, when I do forage into it, I usually find something of interest, and that was the way of it with this month’s issue. They have a list of six trends that are driving the global economy, and the first is headlined “People Power: Blogs, user reviews, photo-sharing — The peer production era has arrived”

It’s a short page of pure truth that I haven’t heard anywhere else, and I could input the whole thing. But because I’m lazy and assume everyone else’s attention span is as short as mine, I’ll distill it even more:

First, steam power replaced muscle power and launched the Industrial Revolution. Then Henry Ford’s assembly line, along with advances in steel and plastic, ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution. Next came silicon and the Information Age. Each era was fueled by a faster, cheaper and more widely available method of production that kicked efficiency to the next level and transformed the world.

Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content. This is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the second-generation Web. The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecendented scale.

Well, exactly. Makes you proud, don’t it?
Not that Wired always has things right. They seem to me to declare it a Brand New Day for people with ipods and DSL in every issue. Plus, they still owe me and the rest of America big time for being one of the voices that contributed to Y2K paranoia and to the complete over-hype of the Segway. But this time I think they’re total visionaries because I agree with them.

They make note of how businesses like Netflix and Amazon have made use of user-generated content, and then go on to say …

But the real miracle is in the more intentional work millions of us do to populate the Web: 80 million MySpace pages, 40 million bloggers, nearly a million amateur encyclopedians. The result is a shared culture of fandom, commentary, and camaraderie. …

Previous industrial ages were built on the backs of individuals, too, but in those days labor was just that: labor. Workers were paid for their time, whether on a factory floor or in a cubicle. Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy. The currency is reputation, expression, karma, “wuffie,” or simply whim. …

This isn’t amateurs versus professionals; it’s each benefiting the other. Companies aren’t just exploiting free labor; they’re also creating the tools that give voice to millions. And that rowdy rabble isn’t replacing the firm; it’s providing the energy that drives a new sort of company, one that understands that talent exists outside Hollywood, that credentials matter less than passion, and that each of us has knowledge that’s valuable to someone, somewhere.

That last part was so great I was forced to italicize it. Because I’m not really as interested in this “people power” revolution from a business standpoint as from a cultural standpoint. It’s been the nature of things ever since culture started to be mass-produced that it is left to an elite segment of the society to do the absolutely integral job of storytelling.

Societies always need to do it. Heck, humanity needs to do it. We want to know what we’re doing, how it’s working and what’s right or wrong. It used to be up to myth-makers to put it down for posterity, but it came more and more to be the exclusive venue of those who could promise the most accuracy (journalists and other information collectors) and the most art (crafters of paint, word and celluloid imagery).

It would have stayed that way except for one little thing. These guys have blown it.

Maybe that’s not fair. The mass-produced culture whetted an appetite that they couldn’t possibly keep up with. Newspapers can’t get you the news faster than the internet; looking at crazy people’s paintings isn’t nearly as interesting as posting your holiday photos on the Web; even if movies tried to connect with most of us — which they haven’t done for years — they couldn’t improve the little movies you send and receive on your cellphone.

And so the story of storytellers in the last 50 years or so has been an extremely slow but inexorable train crash called postmodernism. That word is worth another blog entry or 12, but suffice it for now to say that artists, journalists, filmmakers and the like realize there’s a problem, though they really, really don’t like to talk about it. There’s just been a seismic shift, and people are starting to enjoy being their own storyteller, getting their own facts.

It could be a great new day for Christians. After all, the Old Guard of culture-producers went from merely suspicious of us to being outright hostile. And they had the public so well-trained in what to expect from us that there was absolutely no room to try to tell our stories — let alone the story of the Gospel — in clear, honest and contemporary terms. In America, many people have plugged their ears to anything with the name of Jesus Christ in it. But can they still believe in believers? Can they start to re-think their rejection of Christ by finding that the people that go to church on Sunday are not, in fact, parsimonious biddies and hate-filled bigots? Can they begin to see that there’s a light shining there that doesn’t have to do with people just as people?

That’s the very crest of the wave as I see it. Americans have heard the Gospel message so much that they think they know who God is, who Christ is. There’s no hint of the divine mystery in any of it because that wasn’t the way that American Christianity developed. We can be grateful to those who kept the words alive in this country, but can we take those words that people have heard so many times they’ve become cliches and embue them with Life?

It sounds like a lot to put onto the blogosphere or the alternative media of independent filmmakers, radio stations and such. But I think that’s just the point. We rarely consider the incredible power of our millions all made in the image of God. At times when we least expect it, when we often have our eyes trained on a distant star, we move in ways we didn’t intend and create new portions of the God-inspired tapestry of our own story. It’s very hard to look back through our history and detect that vibrant, brilliant trail of the Holy Spirit and the action of grace. It’s much easier to look everywhere and see the terrors that we’ve inflicted on ourselves — the horrors and missteps and tragedies.

But is that our story? When we see that, are we seeing as God sees? Or are the same devils that seem so powerful throwing their considerable talents of confusion into loading the imagery as they would have us see it?

When I read ordinary people’s impressions, I connect with them. There’s a tremendous power in that. Whether it will really change things enough for us in this Church Age to see a different color in the indescribable spectrum of Light remains to be seen. But in any case, I’m glad I was here for this. In my humble opinion, it’s a much more lovely world with “user-driven content” than it was without.