With the rise of online communities and user-participation content sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, and Second Life, Time Magazine's 2006 Person of the Year is, ta-da, YOU. Nice. Peter Stookey (of Peter, Paul, and Mary fame) once remarked jokingly in a concert on the progressive self-centeredness of American magazines, with the scope going from Life to People to Us. Soon, he predicted, a magazine named Me will have nothing but glossy, reflective pages between the covers, so people can admire themselves on every page. Well, that prophecy has begun to be fulfilled, because a reflective mirror surface is exactly what graces the cover of this latest Time issue.
If YOU sense a trace of cynicism in that opening remark, you're not far off. It's not that I disagree with their selection - the mag's "X of the Year Award" has always been about who or what has had the biggest impact, good or bad, on society during the year. Hence the likes of Stalin and Hitler have been previous winners. Nor is the latest choice necessarily overly narcissistic - several of the issue's articles clearly remind us of the potential dangers that lurk with the proliferation of content from everyday citizens of the new democracy, anyone who knows how to post content to the Web (and maybe owns a video camera). Finally, I certainly don't dismiss sites like YouTube or Wikipedia - anyone who's been reading this very blog can see how I've made use of their services, and of course, this blog itself is a small piece of this new phenomenon called Web 2.0.
Still, two aspects about this Person of the Year baffle me. First, why now and not before? Why wasn't this award presented to all of us when we began using emails, newsgroups, instant messaging, E-commerce, online games, etc.? Some of those Internet technologies may not be as flashy or have as extensive an audience reach, but have they not also been vital sources of information and convenience for most of us? Has merely changing the presentation format from text and images to video been that grand a revolution? (By the way, I'm curious if the founders of Yahoo! and YouTube have now set an unwritten standard that innovative Web teams must be composed of a Taiwanese and a Caucasian).
Second, the choice smells like another version of the "technological democratization will save the world" mantra. It's a basic and alluring concept, the idea that if everyone can say something, only good can result. It's the coronation of the right to free speech to the exclusion of all else. But I don't care how many bloggers, Wiki writers, or Second Life avatars are floating out there - they don't form the majority of the population, who at best see posting Web content as an infrequent hobby. And I ask any blogger - if you keep your Web contents personal in nature (like most do), how many people who didn't already know you through other means are reading your blog on an ongoing basis? In other words, who really cares to read content posted by strangers with unknown credentials? Just look at the frequent crap I spew on this blog - are you going to alter your worldview based on what I say here?
Technology, however fancy or new, is just tools. With or without the latest Web 2.0 offerings, people will continue to use other means of communication like paper, established media sources, face-to-face meetings, etc. They may be slower, less convenient, more primitive, but no less informative. The key point is, human nature remains the same, in all its glory and grotesqueness. What makes a common person great, after all, is not that he is common, but that his greatness has been revealed. For some reason, it took an ill-defined technology like Web 2.0 to finally open up Time Magazine's eyes to this person whose unmatched impact existed long before their annual award began.
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