Seriously.
Time Magazine originally started out selecting a “Man of the Year” as a way to sell magazines in the down holiday season, which then turned into “Person of the Year”. Now they’re thinking of naming Twitter as 2009’s Person of the Year. It seems we’ve thrown out the concept of words having meanings.
From the recent Wired article about the brouhaha: “Some may argue that things really went off the rails in 1982, when “The Computer” got the nod. Since then a fair amount of non-persons have won: The Endangered Earth (1988), The Peacemakers (1993), The Whistleblowers (2002), The Good Samaritans (2005) and, of course, You, in 2006, when Time wrote “It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace.”
You might ask, who or what is the other contender for the prize? The economy. Yeah, because it rocked our world in 2009.
Foliomag reports that “after a more than hour-long debate, six panelists were split between two candidates they thought should be named Time magazine’s 2009 Person of the Year. Neither, for the record, were actually human beings. Three panelists voted for Twitter. Three voted for the economy.”
Keep in mind this six-person panel isn’t exactly an Algonquin round table, what with Rudy Guiliani (who apparently tried to nominate….get this….Derek Jeter during the meeting), Barbara Walters, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Gayle King (editor of O magazine), Tom Colicchio (from Top Chef) and a 29 year old mayor of Pittsburgh.
