Time's Person of the Year mirrors Business 2.0's top pick for 50 People Who Matter Now
Time has chosen its Person of the Year... and it's you!
America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.
Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.
Hm, that reminds me of the last July's issue of Business 2.0, when we ran our list of 50 People Who Matter, and the #1 person was... you!
They've long said the customer is always right. But they never really meant it. Now they have no choice. You -- or rather, the collaborative intelligence of tens of millions of people, the networked you -- continually create and filter new forms of content, anointing the useful, the relevant, and the amusing and rejecting the rest. You do it on websites like Amazon, Flickr, and YouTube, via podcasts and SMS polling, and on millions of self-published blogs. In every case, you've become an integral part of the action as a member of the aggregated, interactive, self-organizing, auto-entertaining audience. But the You Revolution goes well beyond user-generated content. Companies as diverse as Delta Air Lines and T-Mobile are turning to you to create their ad slogans. Procter & Gamble and Lego are incorporating your ideas into new products. You constructed open-source and are its customer and its caretaker. None of this should be a surprise, since it was you -- your crazy passions and hobbies and obsessions -- that built out the Web in the first place. And somewhere out there, you're building Web 3.0. We don't yet know what that is, but one thing's for sure: It will matter.
Nice to know that our older cousin is looking to us for tips. Oh, and don't think we didn't consider putting a mirror on the cover too.
Addendum: August J. Pollak points out why "you" is not as appropriate a choice for Time's list as it was for ours:
I'd like to apologize in advance for this, because I'm sure it will offend some. But Person of the Year isn't the Special fucking Olympics. The entire point of the exercise is that everyone doesn't get a medal for participating. The purpose of the issue is to address the person or persons who, for bad or worse, most affected world events of that year. So they picked... everyone? Well of course everyone affected world events the most, fuckwits.
Excellent article. Interesting subject.
Posted by: Tworzenie Stron | March 18, 2007 at 04:45 AM