Time magazine has named me -- I mean, you -- I mean, everybody! -- its Person Of The Year!
Far be it from me to dismiss that as the callow audience-pandering of an entity too marketing-savvy to name Osama bin Laden the person who most affected events in 2001. I mean, my technophobic reservations, notwithstanding, any choice that gets Luce's old middlebrow warhorse tweaking the "Great Man" theory has something to recommend it. But I defy anyone to ingest in unironic triumphalism this representative puree of web 2.0 pabulum: "[w]e 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 [presumably this means good guys in flight suits and not bad guys in dynamite vests, but the great thing about the web is that you get to have it your own way. -jz] and built open-source software."
Hey, we all wanna change the world. When it's on the cover of Time, it's a pretty sure sign it's left the bleeding edge, on the bullet train to bromide.
Meanwhile, out in the desert of the real ...
Okay, that's actually from the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador 25 years ago, a barbaric age before iPods and Google maps which just happens to be our template for Iraq. I mean, we've had overt advocacy for torture and arbitrary imprisonment here in this Year of You.
It's been widely blogged-about, to be sure.
But Jose Padilla hasn't left a comment.
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Chavez wins "Person of the Year" poll ...
Chavez wins "Person of the Year" poll ... Time magazine ignores result
A few days ago, Time Magazine announced the winner of its annual "Person of the Year" award. Many supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution will be disappointed to hear that Hugo Chavez did not make it despite the fact that he won Time's online poll by a wide
margin and got 35% of the votes. This is significant, as Chavez had been the number 1 in
the poll for several weeks and was clearly set to win the award.
Instead, it seems we all have won the award! Indeed, the 2006 Person of the Year is
"you" and much is made of the Web 2.0 and one of its foremost brainchildren, the online
video service YouTube. For that matter Hands Off Venezuela is also a happy user of
YouTube, but still we find it quite amazing that not a word is said about why the winner
of Time's own readers poll is simply ignored and not even mentioned.
The link to their online poll is simply not there any more, although after some Google
searching we traced it back to www.time.com/time/personoftheyear/2006/walkup/, where you
can see the results for yourself. You don't have to be a believer in conspiracy theories
to assume that clearly the Time Magazine editorial board was not happy with the choice of
its readers! Surely the so-called "liberal" magazine did not like the result of its own
poll and decided to push its own candidate, "the YouTube guys".
Interestingly, the present issue of Time carries another article called "Power to the
People" (read it here), which starts by saying:
"Meet 15 citizens-including a French rapper, a relentless reviewer and a real life
lonely girl-of the new digital democracy"
In the whole magazine there are many lauding words for this "digital democracy" but
ironically Time decided to ignore its own "digital democracy" and hide the fact that 35%
voted for Hugo Chavez and 21% for the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
It is true that an online poll is not a very scientific tool but surely it would have
been worth to at least point out who won the Time poll in the first place? If not, what
is the point of organising one on your own website? Maybe because they did not want the
winner to be a popular President of a country where "power to the people" is not just an
empty phrase but is being implemented in practice in the real world, and who has been
democratically elected time and time again?