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“You” are Time’s Person of the Year

Time magazine made its annual pick of Person of the Year, and it’s “You.” It’s more dramatic if you have the paper edition which has a mirrored panel on the front in a Youtube frame, so you see your reflection. Pundits are already labeling it “cop out” and “lame.” (This is not unprecedented though. Remember Time chose the Personal Computer as their 1982 “Machine of the Year”)

But as someone who has focused on participatory media and a book about Wikipedia, you can imagine I found it a clever choice, even if the associated essays were not so interesting. You’re better off going to Edge or Corante. An excerpt from Time’s writeup graf:

“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.”

Myspace wouldn’t be my choice for the list, since Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal, Xanga and others were around much earlier. I’d much rather see the real meta-filtering of Slashdot, Digg and Dailykos explained, or an examination the phenomenon outside the U.S., like with Korea’s Cyworld online community.

To the critics — sometimes there are indeed weird results with user-generated stuff. When I was doing a search for this article, I did a Google search for:

time you wikipedia

Try the Google search, in that order. Yahoo gives the same result.
And don’t hold it against Wikipedia. For some reason, people are linking to an article about a… cat.

UPDATE: Good post from my former partner in teaching citizen media, Dan Gillmor. “I look forward to the day when Time and other traditional magazines fully embrace us when it comes to the journalism. This is coming, and faster than anyone (including me) would have predicted just a year or two ago. It can’t come fast enough, because the time is short to make the transition.”

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  • One Response to ““You” are Time’s Person of the Year”

    1. Shawn McIntosh
      December 18th, 2006 17:37
      1

      The Time announcement should be a great resume-builder for a lot of people.

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