All Time Wants for Christmas is You

Meanwhile, Time's "Person of the Year" is You. Or Me. Or something. Somehow I feel cheated by that choice. I know it's one way of encapsulating the explosion of user-generated content and its influence, but it's becoming a bit of a Time magazine cop-out to use a group (like last year's "Good Samaritans" Bill & Melinda Gates and Bono) or a generic figure (the American soldier in 2003). Surely they could've gone like Salon and named a figure - S. R. Sidarth, as much as anyone else, helped show the influence of YouTube in 2006 - turning an offhand, obscure insult like "macaca" into ultimately something that helped bring down a would-be Presidential contender and possibly influenced the control of the Senate.

Comments

Anonymous said…
You, it's you, it's you you you
Oh you, it's you, it's you you you ...
25 December 2006 at 01:33
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Verbal agreement

From a Grauniad Guardian article on James Dyson , inventor of the dual-cyclone vacuum cleaner: He still has one major ambition. To become a verb, in the same way that Hoover - or, as he puts it, "the alternative" - has done. I suggest to him that people are already using his product but still saying they are "hoovering". He smiles. "I don't think they'll be doing that for long," he says. That struck me as unusual - it's very rare for a firm's leader to say that he wants his product to become a verb. Lots of other companies like TiVo and Google have tried desperately to avoid their name becoming a verb, for fear of the name becoming so generic that the trademark gets diluted. But then, the Languagehat archives seem to show (see comment near the bottom) that Dyson's big on turning his name into a verb. *** Sadly, due to its distinct lack of vowels, the chances of "sng" becoming a verb seem close to zero, regardless of whate...
Read more

50 Cent's crib

This New York Times article on 50 Cent's life in the sleepy suburb of Farmington, Conn. , is quite wry - But a cook at China Palace said Mr. Jackson could save 10 percent on any order over $30... Ah, the privileges of fame... 10% off Chinese takeout! For the party, Mr. Jackson ordered more than $5,000 worth of liquor, including "a lot of Baccardi," according to the owner of a Farmington liquor store who spoke on the condition of anonymity "to protect his privacy." Sipping Bacardi (ooh, caught a Times misspelling) like it's his birthday. How anonymous could a liquor store owner in a suburban town be? It's not like there're hundreds of liquor stores in the town, I'm guessing. I like how they keep referring to him as Mr. Jackson...
Read more