Person of the Year: So 1990

<![CDATA[For some reason people really get worked up over Time Magazine‘s annual person of the year selection. This year, the magazine selected George W. Bush for “sticking to his guns (literally and figuratively)….” Mainly, he was honored because he won the election, which may or may not be a great feat, though I’d argue that is the minimum requirement for political success and Bush hasn’t done much besides winning elections that merits notice. I generally agree with Katrina vanden Heuvel’s take that the choice was “shallow,” though I think the real mistake is to take this decision seriously.
The idea of a Person of the Year selected by a committee at a major media organization is worn out, not just the threadbare rationale for selecting President Bush. In recent years, Time has fallen back on groups, such as the American soldier and “the Whistleblowers,” rather than selecting an individual after the 1990s, the latter part of that decade dominated by technology-related honorees. Then the bubble burst and nerds got less interesting.
The notion of a definitive person of the year is harder and harder on the intellectual stomach, because the monolithic media entities that set the agendas of the 20th century don’t feel representative in an ocean of voices, from the hundreds of television networks, tens of thousands of publications and millions of Web sites and blogs. The real trick, though, was the successful inoculation of the public consciousness with the idea that Time has a sufficiently broad perspective to judge such things; at its root, the Person of the Year was just a way to turn the publication into a news source—it’s PR for the mag, not for the honoree. News organization becomes news story. Neat trick.
So, you get a whole slew of these stories at this time of the year, recognizing all sorts of things, like best gadget and fastest athlete or most doped athlete or hottest supermodel or supergroup…. Every one of these designed to get the publication a little press. I’ve created these things and they work, because it gets the publication covered, it’s easy to create and not very always information, because it’s just opinion.
Opinion does give people something to talk about and that’s the catch. In this cacophonous media environment, there’s no need for a decision by a small group, because the plurality of ideas floating around the mediasphere there’s no reason Time’s perspective should be treated specially. Yes, yes, they have a lot of good journalists, but they have no monopoly on insight. Picking George W. Bush as the person of the year for the second time in four years—both times because he won an election—only illustrates the short horizon at Time.
A scrape of the world’s Web pages would certainly produce more variety in candidates for any category of most significant/of the year and that alone is enough to get people talking. The insight offered by everyone makes a more interesting debate and would likely yield better or more representative choices or, even better, the realization that no choice is as important a statement as the arbitrary ones that we all debate.]]>