Time's Person of the Year: You

When I first heard about Time magazine naming the person of the year, You, it was on a clip from Jon Steward's Daily Show. Called "Newsweak," Stewart appropriately pointed out how silly it was for Time to consider "You" as the person of the year. Are we so stupid to get excited about seeing ourselves in a mirror on the cover of the magazine so that we buy it? Are we supposed to be surprised?



Now I actually read some of the articles in the magazine, including the cover story and I have to admit that it's not that bad. Aside from "you" being a total marketing scheme to sell more magazines, the issue it raised about a new generation of bloggers, podcasters, and internet gurus I think is really one of the major stories about 2006. Everyone is having their 15 minutes of fame with a creative YouTube video, bloggers are becoming an alternative voice for news, and Facebook and MySpace have become unmistakable networking and social tools for countless teens and adults. And it's ridiculous how everything is so integrated. When I started this blog, I was going for the more cut and dry look, with mostly text and maybe some links here and there. But, blogs have become so much more than what I started with a few years ago on my Xanga. It's about sharing videos from YouTube and other video sites. It's about linking to other blogs. When my friends talk about the latest video to sweep the internet, I don't laugh anymore, thinking that the audience who actually cares about these things is small and hardly influential. Justin Laipply's "Evolution of Dance" had been played 37 million times on YouTube, while Smosh performing Pokemon's Theme Song had been played 18 million. The numbers are absolutely astonishing.

But as the Time article admits:

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.

What I believe is that we're just getting started. As more and more kids jump on the internet and take advantage of blogs, photo sharing, etc, the web will continue to get more and more crowded. And as some will find, maintaining a blog is hard work, as is creating a 2 minute clip for YouTube. Some will drop off, while others will thrive. But, who knows who is reading what you write? That's the great anonymity of the internet, where posting is as anonymous as the person reading it. Yet not having a blog or your own MySpace page does not mean you're not participating in this grand experiment. From the most addicted YouTube user to the casual web-browser, you are all the people for which online content exists. So while probably nobody but my girlfriend (thanks Jenny!) reads this blog at the moment, maybe one day more will find it interesting as they click the "Next Blog" button on the top of this page. And maybe one day an anonymous person in Europe will find that some of my posts have something interesting to say about life and culture in America. Until that day happens, I still remain happily content, posting about things I find interesting on the net. But, I do know one thing:

I am putting Time Magazine Person of the Year: 2006 on my resume!