By Staff
What an honor.
When I found out this past Sunday that I have joined the ranks of Time Magazine's Persons of the Year for my efforts of providing content for the Internet, I didn't know who to thank first.
Of course, I found out shortly afterward the honor is not singly mine – I am sharing it with at least 200 million others.
Also, I wasn't honored by name, but the praise was implied. After all, I am a 'You.'
What's more, it wasn't really an honor. Time Magazine has gone to great lengths to point out that its annual highlight edition is not meant to be a tribute – instead, their goal is to point out those individuals (or groups, or inventions, or planets) who have had the greatest impact during a given year.
Time began issuing their Man of the Year – renamed to the more politically acceptable Person of the Year in 1999 – in 1927. Through the years, their choices have been heralded and hated. Every president since FDR, save one, has had his face on the cover, many more than once. Communist stalwarts like Nikita Khrushchev, Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev are among the list of famous and infamous, as are dictators Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin and the Ayatollah Khomeini.
The public outcry from selecting Iran's revolutionary leader has been met with less bold choices in the following years – the same sentiment likely kept Osama bin Laden off the front of the 2001 edition, even though the terrorist leader easily met Time's selection criteria.
But now, the group chosen is everyone who produces content for or uses the Internet, putting every person who points and clicks on a Web page in the same fold as the self-righteous bloggers, the high school hackers, the online gamblers and the porn site producers.
Was their choice a cop-out? It's likely, although this isn't the first time that Time has made an all-encompassing selection. Anyone under 25 got the nod in 1966, as did the "Middle Americans" three years later.
The problem with the 2006 pick, besides being vague and overly broad, is that it's about as relevant as choosing people who use a telephone or read a newspaper.
In short, the Internet is no longer the novelty it was a few years ago. It has been just under 15 years since Al Gore invented the Internet, but the network-based communication system not only caught on rapidly, but it became engrained in our everyday lives with almost frightening speed.
While only about every other person in the United States is a regular Internet user – and fewer are content producers – the numbers are still large. However, saying this group has had the greatest impact in 2006 is not only dubious but also outdated.
These days, many Web sites, such as Google, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia and Weather.com, have become institutions and are used practically by second nature. However, the same could have been said five years ago.
The Time article claimed their story is about a "community and collaboration on a scale never seen before." In the strictest sense, this may be true based on the shear number of people involved.
However, consider the telephone. This revolutionary device thoroughly changed a world that was largely ignorant of mass communication. Mind you, it took longer for the telephone to become as widespread as the Internet, primarily due to the fact the supporting infrastructure had to be built from the ground up.
As a sidenote, this same infrastructure was used in the development of the Internet.
The article further claims we are living in the world of Web 2.0 – a world of MySpace profiles and YouTube videos, but it conveniently forgets to mention that MySpace usage is quickly falling off and YouTube is populated with mainly boring, pathetic or even stolen video.
The Internet's impact on our lives is undeniable, but it's also not new. Time's first Man of the Year, according to Wikipedia, was done to make up for not featuring Charles Lindbergh's historic flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Now, 79 years later, Time's feature of Internet users is, once again, yesterday's news.