TIME Magazine continues to keep it's annual Person of the Year stunt interesting. Thanks to social media technology like YouTube and Second Life, YOU are TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006.
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? 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.
Wow. They're pouring it on pretty thick. It almost reads like a Bud Light Real Men of Genius spot.
Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas.
The real genius in all of this is that we will help ensure healthy print sales with plenty of posts just like this one.
tags | public relations | PR | Time person of the year 2006 | media | Time magazine | blog | consumer-generated media | social media
Of course, the REAL genius would have been to spring for a reflective foil insert in the YouTube knockoff on the cover, so that the reader would in fact have been on the cover of the magazine.
And to think that someone could pay me for these ideas in advance...
Posted by: Ike | 12/19/2006 at 12:39 AM