A clip of Colbert’s speech ended up on YouTube minutes later; in less than 48 hours, the video had attracted 2.7 million views.

At that point, YouTube was about only four months old. Officially launched on December 15, 2005, it would soon become an unfettered public-access channel and the poor-man’s TiVo. This was largely thanks to Saturday Night Live’s “Lazy Sunday,” an unexpectedly hysterical faux-rap video featuring Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg wasting away the Sabbath by getting high and going to see the Chronicles of Narnia. That particular digital short was YouTube’s big breakthrough, essentially establishing both the site and Andy Samberg’s career. From that point on, YouTube could make people famous — people like OK Go and Funtwo, the mysterious guitar player.

Instead of treating the Internet’s potential as a rival, The Colbert Report used the Web as an ancillary — a tool not just to report about, but to analyze and to manipulate. Last July, for instance, Colbert proffered the neologism “Wikiality,” a compound of “reality” and the community-built online encyclopedia Wikipedia, denoting “truth by consensus.” And to illustrate Wikiality’s potential, Colbert staged this in-character prank: he asked his viewers to sabotage Wikipedia’s elephant-related entries, altering them to read that the population of African pachyderms had doubled in the past six-months, a joke for all those crazy-lefty endangered-species activists. By all accounts, Colbert’s plea mobilized the masses, since by the next morning, Wikipedia’s server had crashed, various elephant-related entries were locked, and a particularly meddlesome user called “StephenColbert” had been blocked from editing the site.

Colbert rallied his audience on another occasion, asking them to vote online to name a Hungarian bridge after him. It worked — he won. He also issued “Stephen Colbert’s Green Screen Challenge,” a contest to edit footage of him rolling around with a light saber into any background scene. Contestants submitted their entries online, some of which he broadcast. And he offered his own advice to protect Internet privacy: “Pick the right password . . . ideally you’ll pick a password not even you can remember . . . Seems excessive, I know, but can you really trust yourself not to get drunk, stumble home, and empty your bank account into one hand of high-stakes poker?”

In 2006, the bespectacled improv comedian appeared on the cover of Wired, graced the front of Rolling Stone, was named one of Time magazine’s Most Influential people, and was anointed as one of People magazine’s Sexiest Men. The message? Even the sexiest men are conversant in the “Internets.”

GOING OUT ON THE INTERNETS: David Lehre’s comic short MySpace: The Movie = YouTube + MySpace.

The film ended up on YouTube, and within a month, it had been viewed approximately six-million times. Less than a year later, Lehre has a development deal with Fox. As Lehre recently told GQ, “I knew that if I made MySpace: The Movie, 90 million users would want to watch it. This wasn’t like a love letter to MySpace; it was a marketing move.”

And so this year, a handful of other hacks referenced MySpace to gain attention for otherwise mediocre artistic efforts — see songs like Mitchy Slick’s “MySpace,” Love Force’s “My Space Land,” and Evergreen Terrace’s “New Friend Request.”

Ultimately, what makes MySpace compelling is that its population is bigger than Mexico, yet it’s totally classless. Lupe Fiasco checks his page and so does my junior-high-school niece. Nicole Richie, Paris Hilton, and ex–Smashing Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlain have all supposedly used MySpace like publicists; Travis Barker and ex-wife Shanna Moakler didn’t even have to bother clucking to the tabloids to drum up publicity about their divorce — they battled each other on competing MySpace blogs. Meanwhile, I used MySpace to figure out which one of my 21-and-under nephews believed he was “hung like a rhinoceros.”

Never mind what YouTube has done for leveling the playing field. Before YouTube, video bloggers were still editing QuickTime clips and posting them on their personal sites, draining their bandwidth, and attracting traffic by e-mail blasts and message-board posts. Then came Harlem’s Chicken Noodle Soup Dance; Tucker Carlson’s fiasco immortalized on Dancing with the Stars; and Lonelygirl15, the home-schooled video blogger later revealed to be an actress. In less than a year, YouTube became a $1.65 billion dollar property.

Time magazine calls this sort of playfield-leveling a “new digital democracy.” Perhaps. But what seems more interesting is that while technology — moviemaking, recording radio shows, networking on a grand scale — used to be a thing of privilege, now it’s for everybody.

Case in point: one of the biggest Kings of the Mountain felt the only way he could comment on the phenomenon was to dismiss it. “I don’t surf the net, no, I never been on MySpace,” said Jay-Z in “Beach Chair” from his post-retirement Kingdom Come CD. Of course, this is also the album whose early leak caused Universal to sue MySpace. (And never mind that in Sean Carter’s Hewlett-Packard commercial, Jay-Z admits to playing chess and tracking his stocks online.)

Think about it: everybody’s using the Web to define themselves these days. The only way you’d already heard LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver was by finding the You-Send-It link. You probably found out about that crazy loft dance night from a particular message board. Your favorite DJ? He has a blog, probably even a fat directory of digital mixes. So-called “tastemakers”? They’re regularly scouting and/or writing about their thoughts. Your little cousin? He’s got a MySpace page.

The New York Times may think it takes a certain kind of “geek” to spend a significant amount of time online. But according to Time magazine’s Person of the Year, that “geek” is you.