Person of the Year? ME!

Imagine my absolute delight and amazement at discovering that Time Magazine had named me (ME!) Person of the Year. There it was screaming out at me on the cover PERSON OF THE YEAR – YOU. Awesome! I never realized that losing those last 5 pounds and switching to an energy efficient fridge and doubling my contribution to NPR would have so profound an effect. It made me feel all Sally Fields warm and fuzzy -- “They like me, they really like me!”

Who else could they mean but me? Who knew that for years my family, friends, co-workers, ex-husband and lovers had been such visionaries demanding to know, “Why is it always about you?” Now, no less than Time Magazine has validated their sense of my fabulous destiny. At least I thought so until I cracked open the pages.

Apparently the ‘you’ Time is talking about and to is actually ‘them.’ Them that are way over on the other side of the digital divide from me. The magazine, an integral part of the stodgy main stream media is honoring those who are using the internet to by-pass and sometimes show-up the old Timers by uploading, downloading, viral-videoing and blah blah blogging news and information.

These hawks of this new people power revolution system aren’t just the man of the year, now they’re da’man. They’re not just the prophets of profits from the biggies like the YouTubers and MySpacers and Googlians. They’re the little wiki people who battle over obscure entries in Wikipedia. They are the millions of computer users loading us up, literally with too much information. Forget 15 minutes of fame, how about 15 gigabytes of blog. But here’s a reality check, everyone can’t be famous. And the renegades of conventional communications are now sort of, I guess, the mainstream. Kind of the same way the hippest things become increasingly uncool when embraced by the maddening crowd. Remember UGGS?

As an analog kind of gal you will never find any me on YouTube and when I refer to MySpace, I simply mean the spot I park my car or a handy alibi for ditching a boyfriend. Although I want to say blog humbug, I can easily waste a few hours linking to links. But mostly I have a life without time to keep up with the deluge of digital data. I’d rather wait for my snail mail magazine subscriptions and my morning newspaper to weed through it all, so I can soak in a hot bath and slowly feel the pages get soggy.

The editor of Time proudly noted that they’d printed up almost 7-million copies of this year’s fanfare to the common computer user with its unusual reflective Mylar cover. And I couldn’t help but note that the “YOU” reflected back at me was a little distorted and misshapen. Not unlike a lot of that marvelous people power revolution taking place in cyberspace.

by Stephanie Becker