Person of the Year: You

[sigma7]

Time's Person of the Year is you. Not me, you. Reading the headline on CNN.com was surreal -- it read like a piece straight out of the Onion. I'm ambivalent -- in one way, it does seem like a terrific cop-out, but in another sense, there was no one person driving 2006 (I did enjoy the idea being bandied about in meetings to name Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush as an Axis of [something undetermined] for the year; they were certainly quite influential as a troika). It's not as much of a cop-out as naming YouTube the Person of the Year, which they toyed with, but the idea behind it fed into the result for 2006.

Reading the story, though, it's obvious they wanted to name "Web 2.0" the Person of the Year, and God, what an awful idea for an overused, annoyingly hollow catchphrase.

It is, I guess, the least sucky idea from a sucky list. And yet I'm curious by the distinction: "you." Not "we," not "us," "you." Hrm. I guess if they'd said "we are," they were afraid Time's employees were Persons of the Year, and I don't think anybody's buying that.

Comments

[jim-smith.livejournal.com]

I'm starting to wish they'd just admit that this isn't as easy as it used to be and just give up. I'd speculate that future persons of the year will be Iraq, embyronic stem cells, Jesus, and That Guy Over There, but now both the title and the concept of cop-out choices have jumped the shark.