Time Person of the Year is....You



As is the case, Time Magazine has named the Person of the Year, and if you have grabbed the magazine, or read it at your local bookstore/magazine rack, you've seen the shiny square on the front cover that acts as a mirror. The reason for the reflection is simple, Time has decided that the Person of the Year is us. That is any one who has made any sort of content on the Internet. It's all about Web 2.0. It's social networking, its blogs, wikis, podcasts, vidcasts. It's people making media and culture through the tools that make up the Internet. It's somebody using Audacity to record their own podcast, speaking into a simple or expensive microphone and saving the sound file as an MP3 to later upload to a website. It's that person talking about any subject they want to talk about, knowing there's someone who will share their interest. Instead of a microphone, it could be a webcam or a digital video camera and suddenly its a vidcast. Whatever it's people making culture.

It's a YouTube video of someone's interesting music video or something rather bizarre. It could be cats doing rather interesting and cute tricks, or people doing weird tricks. It's technology and culture together.

Now there are some who complain about this choice. The recent episode of Twit (number 80), has John C. Dvorak complaining about the choice. He felt it was cheesy and wondered why they went for a construct rather then a newsmaker. Other complaints given is that the Net is still a Western phenomenum, since much of the world barely has the electricity or food, let alone the Internet Connection to become involved with Web 1.0 let alone 2.0. However the Net is growing, China and India are opening up big to the Internet. Likely the day will come when Chinese will be the language of the Net.

Some have suggested the better choice should have been the people who brought YouTube to the world, certainlhy after being bought out by Google for a billion and change. Had Time done that, the issue would have been sold-out, since the two would have bought ever single issue of the magazine, I mean you can do that with a billion dollars.

On one hand, it is good to see the grassroots media is being recognized, on the other, it may be too soon to discuss where the Social Networking will take us. Like anything else, there is good and there is bad.

Still it's being making culture, and that's always a good thing