Time's Person of the Year

[snuffbox 0]

Me. You. All of us.

 

We did it, now how do we celebrate? We can all pool our 96% tax cuts and have a heckuva party.

[Guest "Go, Mordecai!"]

Wait, are you shitting me? The American People are the Person of the Year? God, Time is such a fucking joke now. Remember when they used to give Man of the Year to a person? Like, one of them? And sometimes they were bad men, like Hitler, because the idea behind the "award" is that this one person is the most significant person in the world? Now we've had The Whistleblowers and The American Soldier and now just Everybody. Come on now.

[Guest Starks]

Time's Person of the Year isn't the huge accolade that it once was. It really went down hill when they pussied out in 2001 and gave the award to Rudy Giuliani instead of Osama Bin Laden. Their rules of selection clearly state the "Person of the Year" should be "the individual or group of individuals who have had the biggest effect on the year's news".

[Guest "Go, Mordecai!"]

Time Magazine Names You Person of the Year

 

TELL ME THAT IS NOT A FUCKING ONION HEADLINE. Check their archives. They may have used it for real.

 

[snuffbox 0]

This should be a time of great pride & community spirit, Czech. Yo everyone, we did it!

[CanadianChris 0]

It's actually YouTube and MySpace and other user-generated Internet content sites. Saying it's Everyone is stupid.

 

EDIT: Stupid for the media, that is.

[Toshiaki Koala 0]

There are lots of people in my line of work who believe that this phenomenon is dangerous because it undermines the traditional authority of media institutions like TIME. Some have called it an "amateur hour." And it often is. But America was founded by amateurs. The framers were professional lawyers and military men and bankers, but they were amateur politicians, and that's the way they thought it should be. 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. The new media age of Web 2.0 is threatening only if you believe that an excess of democracy is the road to anarchy. I don't.

[snuffbox 0]

The cover says "You"

 

Try again, bud.

[Hogan Made Wrestling 0]

Time Magazine Names You Person of the Year

 

TELL ME THAT IS NOT A FUCKING ONION HEADLINE. Check their archives. They may have used it for real.

 

 

Nice! Anyone have a picture of that fake cover that had Vince McMahon as person of the year, that Vince used in a promo a few years back?

 

This award is getting way to cutesy with all these awarding to large and/or nebulous groups. Sure the Giuliani over Bin Laden thing was spineless but at least they were willing to award it to a single identifiable person. Awarding it to a couple of closely connected people (such as Bill Gates/Melinda Gates/Bono) isn't bad either. But "The American Soldier"? "You"? Come on.

 

I can't wait to see The Colbert Report this week.

[CanadianChris 0]

The cover says "You"

 

Try again, bud.

Try again? That's what it is.

[snuffbox 0]

http://www.cnn.com/

 

Look at the cover of the magazine.

[bobobrazil1984 0]

essentially its their way of saying "Explosion of Youtube, Blogs, and Myspace" are the persons of the year. All of those are user-generated content. Hence the YOU. A little silly, but it also makes a certain kind of sense since those things, in particular Youtube and Myspace are huge newsmakers in the year.

 

I suppose they could have had the CEOs of those particular companies be the People of the year, but whatever.

[CanadianChris 0]

http://www.cnn.com/

 

Look at the cover of the magazine.

I KNOW what the cover of the magazine says. The story is YouTube/MySpace/etc.

[snuffbox 0]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...1569514,00.html

 

Time Magazine agrees that it is "you" or "everyone"...but what do they know that Bloomberg dont know? M I rite?

[bobobrazil1984 0]

you guys are arguing like retards. One of you insisting on the symantics of it, and the other is talking about the meaning. Talk about a microcosm of why debate in this country is so fucked.

 

SYMANTICS: YOU is the person of the year. It says YOU on the cover.

MEANING: YOU is really referring to user-generated content (generated by... YOU) that has made huge news, some of which actually disseminate news, youtube, myspace, blogs, facebook, etc. It says this right in the blurb.

 

there, happy? retards.

[snuffbox 0]

I don't see how this is such a riddle. Read Time's own article. It's not long.

[bobobrazil1984 0]

then wtf are you arguing about? You're both right. and i explained why. and if you can't understand why the other is right also, then you'd be a retard.

[snuffbox 0]

I'm no retard...I'm one of Time Magazine's People of the Year, goddamit!

[bobobrazil1984 0]

 

(only if you'd posted it in a myspace blog)

[CanadianChris 0]

Duck season.

[MarvinisaLunatic 0]

The average person who still reads Time's printed magazine probably has no idea what this new fangled internet invention is, let alone Myspace and all. So I dont get the "YOU"..as its probably more like "NOT YOU, YOU OLD TECHNOPHOBE..GET WITH THE 21st CENTURY"

[snuffbox 0]

Wabbit season you stupid fucker.

 

In all honesty, we should be allowed to hunt whatever we please after winning an award of this magnitude.

[Gary Floyd 0]

I'm going to have to talk to my lawyer about, this, because i don't think I'm ready for this kind of responsibility,

[BUTT 0]

essentially its their way of saying "Explosion of Youtube, Blogs, and Myspace" are the persons of the year. All of those are user-generated content. Hence the YOU. A little silly, but it also makes a certain kind of sense since those things, in particular Youtube and Myspace are huge newsmakers in the year.

 

I suppose they could have had the CEOs of those particular companies be the People of the year, but whatever.

Dude if Tom was Time's Man of the Year I would cry.

[SuperJerk 0]

Person of the Year: You

Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.

By LEV GROSSMAN

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.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...1569514,00.html

[snuffbox 0]

I'm busting out the Cutty Sark tonight.

[SuperJerk 0]

They just need to retire the award now.

 

Who is it going to be next year?

 

Them?

[Guest "Go, Mordecai!"]

This should be a time of great pride & community spirit, Czech. Yo everyone, we did it!

::blasts "The Final Countdown"::

[SuperJerk 0]

This should be a time of great pride & community spirit, Czech. Yo everyone, we did it!

::blasts "The Final Countdown"::

 

<----me dancing

[snuffbox 0]

We all need to defend our crown. Everyone, build your Myspace pages into epics, flood YouTube with stupid bullshit we all do daily, never leave home without your Ipods. This is our glory people, and we must retain it in 2007!