Time's Person of the Year: Why its YOU, my friend

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/12/16/time.you.tm/index.html

From the December 25, 2006 issue of TIME magazine

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[TIME.comexternal link] -- The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.

But look 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.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

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.

America loves its solitary geniuses its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Who are these people? Seriously, 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 nation 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.

Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious.

Excellent work, Gentlemen. :2thumbsup:

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Originally Posted by Ice

Excellent work, Gentlemen. :2thumbsup:

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Hey, Times have never done that before. Kewl.

I'm so gonna boast this at the Christmas party and see how many people knows about it. "Dude, YOU are TIMES' person of the year!" ... "WHAT!?" :laugh4:

I was the times person of the year for 2004. Nice to have 2 trophies now though.

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Originally Posted by holybandit

I was the times person of the year for 2004. Nice to have 2 trophies now though.

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Hi George.

Hmm. Since everyone on the planet has now become a person of the year, does that mean there will be no more rewards?

What a cop out

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Originally Posted by Grey_Fox

Hmm. Since everyone on the planet has now become a person of the year, does that mean there will be no more rewards?

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Tecnically if you read the article you get the idea that the prize is for everyone on the planet that is online on the internet

...It´s good to feel that the club is a little more select....:laugh4: :knight:

In another forum someone posted this link.:inquisitive:

A friend just did the whole "YOU'RE the Person of the YEar."

Got me pretty good for a bit. :wall:

Guns, Germs and Steel basic premise is that inventions will be created eventually by any group given the right set of resources and interactions.

So the thought space isn't original... which kind of proves itself. :laugh4:

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What a cop out

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Really, this is lame.

They have a bunch of stupid examples; the mass of people didn't create youtube or facebook, a small group created it. Nor do these things have any real impact on the world - there's a war going on in Iraq, a world wide struggle between fundamentalist Islam and the west, and these fools are saying myspace is important.

CR

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Originally Posted by Crazed Rabbit

Really, this is lame.

They have a bunch of stupid examples; the mass of people didn't create youtube or facebook, a small group created it. Nor do these things have any real impact on the world - there's a war going on in Iraq, a world wide struggle between fundamentalist Islam and the west, and these fools are saying myspace is important.

CR

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What's the POINT of Youtube or Facebook without audience participation? Besides, YouTube or Facebook would have gotten created on their own by other people if their current creators didn't make them first.

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Originally Posted by Crazed Rabbit

Really, this is lame.

They have a bunch of stupid examples; the mass of people didn't create youtube or facebook, a small group created it. Nor do these things have any real impact on the world - there's a war going on in Iraq, a world wide struggle between fundamentalist Islam and the west, and these fools are saying myspace is important.

CR

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Precisely. :2thumbsup:

This techno-utopian nonsense has little bearing on the real world or four-fifths of its inhabitants.

EDIT: Removed links that probably added little to the discussion at hand.

I'd like to state that I have not participated in any of the activities mentioned in the article (AFAIK, I skimmed). My only contributions to the online world are in the form of forum posts.

Also: really lame choice.

Well, at least nobody got their ego inflated ten-fold by this year's award. ~:rolleyes: Probably for the best.

Everyone gets a gold star! Hurray for mediocrity... Yayyy! :thumbsup: :yes: :2thumbsup: :beam:

/sarcasm

Next I think we should stop keeping the score of sports… LAME!

The esteemed Register reflects my own opinions on "Web 2.0" and in typical fashion, has just addressed this Time nonsense.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

John Doe blogger named Person of the Year
Wiki-fiddlers - it's your hour

By Andrew Orlowski
Published Monday 18th December 2006 16:57 GMT


Few publications in the world take themselves as seriously as Time magazine, and Christmas each year finds it at its most unctuous and self-important, as Time chooses its "Person of the Year". This year, the award for newsmaker of 2006 is given to "You" - the internet user.

But perhaps not you or me. The kind of internet user lauded by Time doesn't do what most of us do - window shopping on eBay, adding bon mots to Popbitch or Something Awful, or grazing for free music. It has in mind a special kind of "You" - the wiki-fiddling, bloggers of Web 2.0, or the "citizens of the new digital democracy" as Time editor Richard Stengler calls them.

We've noted before how the web hype causes people to lose their minds: creating a virtual parallel universe, complete with its own off-the-shelf belief system for the hard of thinking. People don't pick and choose their causes here because Web 2.0 provides them with all the causes they need - as a pre-packaged slate. So someone who thinks blogs are "democratizing" media will also think Wikipedia is a splendid thing, that copyright is evil, that Wi-Fi will free the people, that Net Neutrality is something to worry about, that economics are being turned upside down by "the Long Tail", and that mash-ups are inherently creative. In other words, it's a cult - the latest in a long line of cults to emerge from Northern California.

And it's a given that it's all "revolutionary".

"It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before, burbles Time's Lev Grossman. "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."

(We doubt if Grossman would dare make such a claim in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward today; Katrina was a natural disaster and public scandal in which we owe the bloggers nothing.)

Even more improbably, Time claims that "you control the Information Age". This, on the day that news broke of an identity theft involving more than 100 million Americans, and as citizens challenge the pervasive state monitoring by the unholy hairball of telecomms companies and state agencies.

Stengler admits it's a cop-out. Previous winners have included Hitler and Stalin, but since 2001 Time feels it's too troublesome to explain that "significant newsmaker" is not a moral endorsement, and so in 2001 shunned Osama Bin Laden for Mayor Guiliani. The most deserving conventional candidate this year, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was denied, Stengler explained :

“It just felt to me a little off selecting him,” he said.

While wiki-fiddlers everywhere will be delighted with this patronizing pat on the head from a media giant, not everyone is so easily seduced.

Venture Capitalist and pundit Paul Kedrosky thinks this absurdity marks the zenith of the bubble. John C Dvorak thinks it's even dafter than Time choosing "the computer" as PoTY in 1984. Nick Carr reminds us of the curse of PoTY.

Alone in offering a note of dissent in the magazine itself is NBC anchor Brian Williams, who warns that the self-indulgence on offer with "personalized" media may result in people getting more stupid, not smarter.

"The danger just might be that we miss the next great book or the next great idea, or that we 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," he writes

As so often, Seth Finkelstein has the sharpest epigram, pointing out "Popularity Data-Mining Businesses Are Not A Model For Civil Society" - words which should be written on Web 2.0's tombstone. (Read the comments to see how one of these generic web cultists, or robots, responds - in typical fashion).

We've been over this ground so many times repetition is surely pointless, is it not, dear readers? Especially when you've done such a splendid job. But may we point out - again - that a "democracy" that excludes most of the population, and where a tiny number of people vote very often, but most don't vote at all, isn't really a model for anything. ®

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As so often, Seth Finkelstein has the sharpest epigram, pointing out "Popularity Data-Mining Businesses Are Not A Model For Civil Society" -

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:2thumbsup:

Does this mean Time supports communism and all of its bastard offspring varities?

We knew that before this.