TIME magazine's recent Person of the Year issue announcing that "you" are this year's winner struck me as oddly timely so to speak, accurate, but perhaps a little belated. After all, the Web and new media is saturated with evidence of this fact already in action. Could TIME be, as it were, behind the times...?
I mean, take MySpace and Youtube, which have been around for a few years. These social networking tools are all about "me" and "you." So, what's TIME's issue really about? Are they afraid of falling behind the proverbial bandwagon of what's hot, what's news, and how information really gets delivered in today's 21st century media environs? Hmmm. Below is an excerpt from a comment I posted on Mark Glaser's blog on PBS.org. Let me know what you think.
MY COMMENT on MARK GLASER's pbs.org BLOG "MediaShift":
I see TIME's "Person of the Year: You" as a bit of a tactic to link itself with the democratization and community vernacular surging through new media channels. Since TIME is an old-school media player, it risks losing cache in an era of 21st blog-o-bytes and social, niche, networking news. With the "You" issue, they may demonstrate their knowledge of this fact – of falling behind the "cool" of modern news – but admitting this doesn’t insert them into the race as a top player. Like you suggest, Mark, TIME needs to make some active, conscientious changes in how it interacts with the social networking of news if it intends to be taken seriously.
The fact is, most media savvy people today already know they are their own "Person of the Year" so to speak – that’s just how things have changed over the last few years. I don’t see it as narcissistic, as in "I am the only important being," but more about being aware that I (as in the "my" and "you" reflected in the names MySpace and Youtube) matter, and because I know that I matter, I’m going to engage with society, be active, be heard and listen. This seems to be the trend of new media – engaging on the world stage of idea sharing. If TIME really gets this, then they need to prove it.
