Time has announced the person of the year (2006).
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…
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.
The crew at Bring it On! respects and appreciates you, but disagrees with Time nonetheless.
That said, I must disagree with the Person of The Year pick by Time Magazine, not because YOU aren’t important, but because YOU are still a project in the works. In 2008, YOU might just come full circle to step up and claim the potentially rightful Person of The Year prize.
But in the MEANTIME, I shall staunchly stand behind my OWN “Person of The Year� nomination, the TRUE “maverick� Senator, like him or not; Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), and I’ll be glad to explain further:
Let’s face it, Senator Lieberman is THE most powerful man in the United States right now, BAR NONE. Forget President Bush, forget Vice President Cheney, forget ALL of them — Joe has POWER. He votes mostly along Democratic Party lines, but is loved, respected, coddled, and revered amongst Republicans…
This man is so powerful; he would probably be encouraged by President Bush to have sex with the First Lady if he would just sign on the “dotted line�, and such a notion is probably not THAT much of a stretch when you give rightful consideration to the players involved. This man could, and probably HAS been accepting limitless bankwire transfers to Swiss bank accounts just to answer his cellphone when certain “Republican somebodies� place a call to him.
Heh.
Ed Morrissey calls it Person of the Year, Suck-Up Version, Michael Scherer at Salon considers Sidarth (from the macaca incident) to be the person of the year, Arianna Huffington concludes that YOUR ego was right all along and Jeralyn E. Merritt isn’t exactly impressed either.
After all these mostly negative posts, let me look at the bright side of the person of the year according to Time. To a degree the choice makes sense: the Internet had another revolutionary year. Not just regarding MySpace and YouTube, but blogs and forums too have become bigger and more important. However, those programs, boards, blogs, spaces, the Internet in general, are only so big because individuals use them. Without you, nothing would happen. Without you the new Internet revolution would not be.
Now, after looking at the bright side of this nonsense, let me add the following: the entire person-of-the-year tradition is incredibly silly, trivial, subjective and ridiculous.
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