December 18, 2006
You are Time's Person of the Year Cop-out
Towards the end of the year, it becomes sport to wonder who Time's Person of the Year will be. It's sort of like wondering who will be on the cover of Sports Illustrated or who People's Sexiest Man Alive is (both are also Time Inc. publications, as it were). Time tried to get its readers excited, asking them to vote online for who they thought should be the Person of the Year, with choices being George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Kim Jong Il, Al Gore, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, Nancy Pelosi, and The YouTube Guys. Well, if you bothered to vote, you never had a chance - Time decided to make "You" the Person of the Year.
And by "You," Time means anyone with some sort of connection to the Internet. From its introductory article:
...[L]ook at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes...Wa wa wee wa, that's boring. Because it's not like Web 2.0 ever fails to navel gaze! Sure, Web 2.0 probably hit some sort of critical mass this year, but this observation still seems late. And by lumping everyone and everything together, it seems trivialize some Web 2.0 types who have been at the forefront - and other "Persons of the Year" - while overemphasizing the importance of others. We don't know, on the other hand, it does give us the chance to accept a hearty clap on the back for wasting precious time tagging photographs with "cats in clothes."...And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.
And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.
Maybe Time got a memo from the State Department requesting that Ahmadinejad not get the cover (he's the runner-up). But more likely Time wanted some buzz and to appeal to marketers. That plus put a mirror on the cover.
What do you think of Time's selection? Here's a list of previous Person/Machine/Planet of Year's. And Dan Dickinson noticed a flaw with Time Person of the Year sponsor Chrysler's online advertising; Dan also writes, "I look forward to the Person Of The Year 2007 being 'Everybody', followed by 'Humanity' in 2008, and as a complete twist, 'Those Guys' in 2009."
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This proves one thing, how bloody irrelevant Time magazine is.
It's a cop out, but at least there's a rational behind it.
Does this mean Gothamist can put a "Man(woman) of the year" icon at the top??
;)
"It's about the many wresting power from the few..."
That's not really accurate, is it? Rupert Murdoch owns Myspace and Google (I think it was) now owns YouTube and Wikipedia is... well, sometimes right and sometimes a nice, fictional version of the way we'd like the world to really be.
Ah yes, I was pretty certain that my netflix favorites were far more important to the people of the world than war and peace, global warming, terrorism, economics. I rule!
Unbunch your panties--it's a magazine. Next week, something else will be on the cover. If you're really hot for Ahmadinejad, I'm sure you can find pics of the little troll all over the place.
There's a quote in today's Metro from their executive editor, saying basically, he didn't feel like naming Mahmoud Ahmadinejad person of the year.
Not that I'm for that guy, but this is a cop-out on many reasons, particulary b/c he doesn't "feel" like naming someone else. It's almost as if we are all the fallback decision.
Right, Time magazine, no one was doing these things before 2006. Christ, that magazine gets more useless with every issue. This is almost as insipid as when they named Giuliani "Man of the Year" instead of the guy who actually made the damn impact. "Person of the Year" isn't a title of respect; it's about who made the biggest splash that year.
They'll honor 'your' work, as long as they can figure out a way to make money off of it.
What if the "you" who happened to look at the cover was a very important world figure, who made important news headlines this past year? So I guess the cover could be technically correct at some point, albeit in a very lazy way.
Maybe Gothamist should have our own person of the year.
I am Gothamist's "Person of the Year".