When Time Magazine named me “Person of the Year” (yes, I suppose they may have included you too), I ranted that Time had officially erased all doubt that they had long since Jumped the Shark. I did not disagree with their wise assessment that this Web 2.0 age is transforming the power of media and therefore the world itself. (I must now sidebar the fact that I despise the term “Web 2.0″ simply because it is used incorrectly as a popularized generic buzzword far more often than it is used to properly describe certain technical aspects of todays AJAX based web applications.) It’s 100% true. The ability for non-techies to easily create, disseminate, and consume media and information on the net is indeed monumental, but that still doesn’t mean that everybody who’s ever posted a comment on a blog should be named Person of the Year. Maybe next year they’ll name “The spirit of peace on earth” as Person of the Year. Many good articles were written which shared my view that Time has totally wussified the once lofty distinction of Person of the Year. I mean, Time Magazine once had the cahuntas to name Adolph Hitler as Man of the Year, which I won’t disagree with because their mission has always been to name the person who had the most influence on the world, whether positive or negative. But no such bold declarations any longer. Nice and safe all the way for Time.
Then came the execution of Saddam Hussein on December 30th. Well actually it was the next day when some grainy, unauthorized cell phone video of the hanging spread around the world almost instantaneously via the internet. With almost Nostradamus-like foresight, Time Magazine predicted that some unknown hooligan in Iraq with a video enabled cell phone would very soon become Person of the Year. Consider the immense consequences that we’ve yet to realize from this video and you can easily argue that it meets Time’s criteria of influencing the world. And since it took throngs of other net-users to disseminate the video around the world, you too have had a hand in changing the world, for better or for worse.
Here’s another good blog post I found to much the same point.
