Contributed by: filbert Tuesday, December 19 2006 @ 09:01 AM CST
YOU.
Only, not really you, you. Not folks who get up, shower, grab a bite of breakfast, hurry along to work, put in a good day, then come home to a beer and whatever’s on ABC or Fox that night. Them. Like, you know, those wacky Facebookers. OpinionJournal[*1] approaches Time Magazine’s selection thus:
And yet, there is something uniquely demented about this year’s choice. It claims to celebrate You, the reader, the YouTuber, the amateur, the activist. Editor Stengel goes so far as to compare You to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. So then what does Time choose to highlight as examples of greatness in action?
Leila is a 20-year-old single Muslim woman who lives in Maryland and posts diary videos on YouTube: “She says um and ah a lot. She has been known to drink and blog. Sometimes she doesn’t speak at all, just runs words across the screen while melancholy singer-songwriter stuff plays in the background.”
Megan Gill is a 22-year-old senior at the University of Portland who just broke up with her boyfriend and changed her status from “dating” to “single” on her Facebook page. She has 708 registered “friends” who check back for regular updates on her site, such as “Megan is so over first semester,” “Megan is bummed about the election results,” “Megan is tired of letting people down.”
I have seen the present, and it is vapid.