You are Time Magazine's Person of the Year

[kaytodd]

Good column below by George Will on the silliness of naming YOU as Person Of The Year. Time missed an opporunity to discuss the accomplishments, for good or ill, of any number of people who actually accomplished something of significance in 2006 to pander to its readers.

You are ‘Person of the Year’? Get serious

By George Will

Time magazine asked a large number of people to name the Person of the Year. They were in a populist mood and named the largest possible number of Persons of the Year: Everybody.

Of course. The most capacious modern entitlement is not to Social Security but to self-esteem. So Time's cover features a mirror-like panel. The reader — but why bother to read the magazine when merely gazing at its cover gives immediate and intense gratification? — can gaze at the reflection of his or her favorite person. Narcissism is news? Evidently.

To the person looking at his reflection, Time's cover announces, congratulations: "You control the Information Age." By "control" Time means only that everyone is created equal — equally entitled to create content for the World Wide Web, which is controlled by neither law nor taste.

Richard Stengel, Time's managing editor, says, "Thomas Paine was in effect the first blogger" and "Ben Franklin was essentially loading his persona into the MySpace of the 18th century, 'Poor Richard's Almanack.' " Not exactly.

Franklin's extraordinary persona informed what he wrote but was not the subject of what he wrote. Paine was perhaps history's most consequential pamphleteer. There are expected to be 100 million bloggers worldwide by the middle of 2007, which is why none will be like Franklin or Paine. Both were geniuses; genius is scarce. Both had a revolutionary civic purpose, which they accomplished by amazing exertions. Most bloggers have the private purpose of expressing themselves for their own satisfaction. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is nothing demanding or especially admirable about it, either. They do it successfully because there is nothing singular about it, and each is the judge of his or her own success.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 76 percent of bloggers say one reason they blog is to document their personal experiences and share them with others. And 37 percent — soon, 37 million — say the primary topic of their blog is "my life and experiences." George III would have preferred dealing with 100 million bloggers rather than one Paine.

Stengel says that bloggers and the people who upload videos onto YouTube (65,000 new videos a day; 100 million watched each day) are bringing "events" to us in ways that are often more "authentic" than the services of traditional media. But authenticity is easy, and of no inherent value, if it is simply and necessarily the attribute of any bit of reality ("event'') captured on video.

Time's Lev Grossman writes that "an explosion of productivity and innovation" is underway as "millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity" become participants in "the global intellectual economy." Grossman continues:

"Who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch 'Lost' tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the union or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

"The answer is, you do. And 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's Person of the Year for 2006 is you."

There are, however, essentially no reins on the Web — few means of control and direction. That is good, but it vitiates the idea that the Web's chaos of entertainment, solipsism and occasional intellectual seriousness and civic engagement is anything like a polity (a "digital democracy"). Time's bow to the amateurs who are, it strangely suggests, no longer obscure, and in the same game that Time is in, is refuted by a glance — which is all an adult will want — at YouTube's most popular videos.

Time's issue includes an unenthralled essay by NBC's Brian Williams, who believes that raptures over the Web's egalitarianism arise from the same impulse that causes today's youth soccer programs to award trophies — "entire bedrooms full" — to any child who shows up: "The danger just might be that we miss the next great book or the next great idea, or that we will fail to meet the next great challenge . . . because we are too busy celebrating ourselves and listening to the same tune we already know by heart."

The fact that Stengel included Williams's essay proves that Stengel's Time has what 99.9 percent of the Web's content lacks: seriousness.

[99-1100896887]

"You" may be Time's Man Of The Year in the , but the Canadian edition of Time has the Man of the Year as--wait for it--Stephen Harper, Mr. Bland. EVERYONE is more interesting than our PM. One would miss him in a crowd of two, as my Dad used to say.

[criddic3]

LOL

[anonymous1980]

I wonder if I can put this in my resume.

[Sabin]

...sigh...yes.

[Damien]

Does this mean Tom O'Neil is Man Of The Year?

[rain Bard]

I better buy a copy of the magazine to see if my photo is in it then!

[criddic3]

I guess this means they didn't like the idea of a cover with Nancy Pelosi or Kim Jong-Il. While their substitution is incredibly silly, it does beat them anyday.

[Akash]

I'm assuming the voice of Comic Book guy from The Simpsons when I say this:

Dumbest. Idea. EVER.

Thanks for sucking our c-cks Time Magazine!

[Sonic Youth]

Time Magazine has chosen anyone who uses the internet to be the People of the Year, according to Drudge who finds the idea ridiculous.


TIME: EVERYONE IS 'PERSON OF THE YEAR'

**EXCLUSIVE** 7:38 PM ET... IT'S YOU! YOU were named TIME magazine 'Person of the Year' Saturday for the explosive growth and influence of user-generated Internet content such as 'blogs', video-file sharing site YouTube and social network MySpace... You -- YES, YOU -- beat out candidates including Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, China's President Hu Jintao, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi... YOU, YOU, YOU....