Nearly 7 million copies of Time magazine’s annual
“Person of the Year” issue are set to arrive in mailboxes and on
newsstands in the next few days. The cover declares that Person to
be none other than “You. Yes, you.” It explains, “You control the
information age. Welcome to your world.” The image is of a computer
with a flat screen monitor and a screen-laminate of reflective
Mylar. Readers are invited to gaze Narcissus-like at their own
reflection.
Managing editor Richard Stengel explains the odd choice. He uploaded a video to
YouTube asking for input. The responses were numerous. Within days,
the video had “tens of thousands of page views and dozens of video
submissions and comments.” People from across the globe sent in
nominations for all kinds of different Persons, including “Sacha
Baron Cohen, Donald Rumsfeld, Al Gore and many, many votes for the
YouTube guys.”
The editors’ choice is presented as an exercise in populism, and
that’s certainly an easy line of attack. In unconnected phone
conversations over the weekend, nearly a half dozen people joked to
me that they were going to put “Time 2006 Person of the Year” on
their resumes.
It’s worth noting that the selection was really the opposite of
a democratically informed decision. A lot of people put in great
efforts to vote for their choices, and what did the staff of
Time do? Did they cede some of their coveted big media
gatekeeper status and acknowledge the wisdom of the little guy? No.
They decided to toss those results and do something completely
different: a trend story about the social effects of better,
cheaper technology.
The choice was a stretch but, at first glance, not much more
than some past picks. In 1982, the personal computer won
and in 1988 the editors decided to ring environmentalist alarm
bells by naming “Endangered Earth” the “Planet of the Year.” Since
the award’s inception in 1927, it has been awarded to a few
composite characters, including the American fighting-man (1950);
the U.S. scientist (1960); the Baby Boomer (1966); the American
woman (1975); and, again, the American soldier (2003).
And yet, there is something uniquely demented about this year’s
choice. It claims to celebrate You, the reader, the YouTuber, the
amateur, the activist. Editor Stengel goes so far as to compare You
to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. So then what does
Time choose to highlight as examples of greatness in
action?
Leila is a 20-year-old single Muslim woman who
lives in Maryland and posts diary videos on YouTube: “She says
um and ah a lot. She has been known to drink and
blog. Sometimes she doesn’t speak at all, just runs words across
the screen while melancholy singer-songwriter stuff plays in the
background.”
Megan Gill is a 22-year-old senior at the
University of Portland who just broke up with her boyfriend and
changed her status from “dating” to “single” on her Facebook page.
She has 708 registered “friends” who check back for regular updates
on her site, such as “Megan is so over first semester,” “Megan is
bummed about the election results,” “Megan is tired of letting
people down.”
Warren Murray and Leanne White are copyeditors
at the Guardian who produce their own video podcast,
Crash Test Kitchen. It differs from most cooking shows in
that they often screw up the recipes and fight on the air.
Kamini is a black French rapper who grew up in a
tiny town in the countryside. He may one day be able to quit his
job as part-time nurse with great rhymes like, “I wanted to revolt,
except that there, there’s nothing to burn./ There’s just one bus
for the high school, same for the community center,/ Not worth
going and burning a neighbor’s car,/ Cuz they don’t have them,
they’ve all got mopeds.” (People who watched the music video on the
French version of YouTube were wild about it. Honest.)
There are more examples, but this cross-section should give You
a pretty good taste.
As far as trend stories go, this should have been an easy one.
That advances in technology are allowing more people to customize
and produce their own media is inarguable, and some of the results
are truly impressive. Rather than seeking out great examples, the
magazine chose to highlight mostly the weird and embarrassing.
Why?
Part of the problem is institutional. The issue was written
entirely by regular Time staffers and contributors who
seem to have great difficulty understanding this strange new media
man — especially the part about his hatred of condescension.
