hyalineskies

Just when I thought this week couldn’t get any better, I find that things somehow do. Over the course of the past few days, I’ve become a 9rules Network Member, been interviewed for an article going on MSNBC sometime this week, finished some of my toughest classes and had a killer party with my closest friends. Just when I thought everything couldn’t get any better, I was hit with something new. Whilst watching CNN Headline News at a sushi place with a friend, I saw that I, a mere social media blogger, was Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.

In the same moment, I was exhilarated and yet simultaneously felt offended. I’m named Person of the Year and Time doesn’t even send a decent photographer? No phone call or awards ceremony? Not even a link to hyalineskies? What is the world coming to when the person you give the Person of the Year award to doesn’t even get so much as a quote in his own article? Call me conceited or pretentious, but this is just insane. I always thought that winning this award meant something.

I soon realised that, well, I wasn’t the only one that was Person of the Year. I found out that I shared the title with quite a few other people, including social media stars such as Jessica Lee Rose aka lonelygirl15, Ghyslain Raza, the “Star Wars kid,” and Gary Brolsma of Numa Numa fame. I was Person of the Year along with tech icons Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Tom Anderson of MySpace, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. I was also part of a larger group of people such as Bono of U2, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg. Oh, and while we’re at it, I guess I should refrain from naming the rest of the six billion people that Time gave this year’s Person of the Year award to. That’s right. The winner of this year’s Person of the Year award is you, too. This includes all of you people that comment on hyalineskies with your love and admiration and links to penis enlargement pills or penny stocks. This includes all of the people mindlessly ripping my copyrighted code for their own MySpace profiles. This includes all of those kids on Xbox Live who are incapable of killing anyone but fully capable of turning profane words into all sorts of colourful adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, and even conjunctions. Time took what used to be a prestigious award and diluted the quality of it to the point that everyone involved in some way with social media and the information age, be it a terrible videoblogger posting useless drivel to YouTube or the brilliant Lasse Gjertsen, is now Person of the Year. I feel truly sorry for the previous winners of the award.

What was Time thinking?

While I was watching CNN Headline News on this, one of their user comments was by far a better analogy than one I could come up with: “Congratulations Time. You were asked to pick your favourite colour and you chose clear.” Naming everybody Person of the Year doesn’t simply make it appear to the world that you’re sitting this one out; it simply makes you appear as if any shred of journalistic reputability is flying out the window in hopes of appealing to the Internet.

It’s more than a simple self-mockery of traditional journalism; it’s practically suicide. Time might as well just concede defeat of the media to the end user and social media tools, pack up their bags, and go home. I love Time, but I really don’t love what this is all about. If you’ve so much as touched MySpace, YouTube, or the blogosphere, congratulations, you’re everything Time thinks is right with the world. That sphere includes the murderers of MySpace user Ashley Marie Scott and a 20-year-old named Andrew Jude Thompson, who purportedly stabbed his father to death.

All of this social media glory from Time really makes me wonder: Is the world that bad? Is there really no one out there worth giving the Person of the Year Award to? If Time can’t find someone to give their award to, I can’t wait to see who the next set of Nobel Laureates will be.

The social media hysteria

While it’s easy to point fingers at Time for making such a stupid error, maybe the real issue isn’t Time or the casual users of YouTube or MySpace it holds in such high regard; maybe the real issue is us, the people working to build social media technologies, the people with ties to Silicon Valley digerati that influence the old media and venture capitalists alike. All of us authoring, researching, or promoting these tools have helped feed the flames of Web 2.0 hype, and in some way we are all simply cheerleaders of what we do as technologists. We preach the productivity increases in new collaborative software, cheer on the long tail, and slam mainstream media as slow, stubborn, and stupid.

What we’ve got in return is what seems to be a desperate attempt by the mainstream media to show that they’re listening to these things we’re building, too, even though they’re only seeing the mainstream part of it. We’ve built some type of peculiar Stockholm syndrome into the mainstream where we constantly attack them for being almost neo-Luddite in their ways, and in turn the result seems to be that while many still act as stubborn, a select few have decided to love the Web 2.0 world unconditionally. Time spoke of Web 2.0 in their article as if it was something new, stating that “Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.”

Where the hell has Time been? The first of Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conferences was in October 2004, over two years ago. This is practically a century in terms of the Web, especially with the rate at which information changes hands in the social media sphere that Web 2.0 helped create. If Time is just jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon, well, Web 2.0 has become so painfully mainstream that all of us trying to work on the bleeding edge of it are well beyond it. A lot of us are already hearing talks of the cringe-worthy term Web 3.0. If any revolution has occurred, it started way back with the pioneering social network Friendster was created in 2002. You could argue that the social revolution had a lot of its roots in the pre-90s Free Software movement and BBS systems, and the only real difference now is that we’ve added AJAX, Web standards, and some mainstream accessibility to the mix.

With this lack of hindsight, Time seems just as far out of the social media loop as industry technologists like to say that they are; the only difference is that their friends are now using YouTube and think it’s great. There’s no feeling of history, no legacy in the way that they’ve portrayed Web 2.0, and their account of what the social media revolution is is so superficial that it reeks of nothing but absorption of Silicon Valley hype. They’ve taken a social revolution that has been baking in the dot-com underground for years, maybe even decades now and looked at it on a level that is entirely unfitting of a professional magazine. I cannot reiterate enough that Web 2.0 is not something that’s been built overnight; it has been merely an exponential explosion of an underground Internet culture that finally broke the threshold into the mainstream due to easy-to-understand user interfaces and mainstream saturation of communicative infrastructures such as broadband. Web 2.0 is just something that’s been given a name to appeal to tech-hungry Valley venture capitalists. The term Web 2.0 is nothing more than marketing hype.

Have your award back, Time.

Well, Time, being Person of the Year for being a heavy social media participant is nice and all, but unfortunately I have to decline this award. Receiving it feels shallow and misguided; I am receiving an award based not on any true benefit to the world or to society, but rather based upon the hype that makes you believe that Web 2.0 is really such a benefit to humanity and culture.

Instead, it is not the catchphrase of an Internet technology fad that should be the focus of Person of the Year. It is not technological mega-sites like YouTube and MySpace which harness the power of millions creating amateur content for the entertainment of other amateurs; it is not the person uploading that to said mega-sites. If Time wants to give the award to an abstraction of humanity, an altruistic drive in all of us, then it should simply give its award not to everyone and, rather, not to anyone at all. It should be redefined as an award to the spirit of human creativity. It is the creative forces in all of us that drive us to create, remix and mashup, regardless of skill or social class. It is the creative want to build something new, something different, and something that others will like that really is the driving force behind Web 2.0, not venture capital or marketing buzzwords. The Person of the Year, it seems, should not be a person at all.