Person of the Year

I wrote elsewhere last week "I can see Time giving PotY to some fictional abstract like "Democratic centrist voters" this year."

Which would have been ridiculous enough.

But no. This year, Time made a choice which ought to convince the powers that be to retire the Person of the Year designation for all time.

This year, Time chose You.

The thing that's really annoying is how close they are, rhetorically, to getting it right.

It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

Noble sentiments.

But really.

YouTube, in the end, will be America's Funniest Videos on steroids.

You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

That's the vision.

Forget about YouTube for disseminating those "macaca moments" which helped change the balance of power in the US Senate this year. We need more peeks into rumpled bedrooms, and more distractions. And the new web will be pretty good at that.

A couple of years ago, i saw a movie called "Dare mo shiranai" (English translation: Nobody knows) by the director Hirokazu Koreeda (After Life). A fascinating movie based on a true story of four children abandoned by their flighty mother in a Tokyo apartment to fend for themselves for the better part of a year.

At the end, we learn that the role of Keiko, the mother, was played by You.

I went home thinking that the director had made some insightful commentary as to how we all had some responsibility as adult members of the community to have been aware of these kids and provided for their care, that we really couldn't have just said, "we didn't know." Our social contract obligates us to take part in our communities, and to watch out for the most vulnerable among us.

I learned later that there's really an actress named You.

Unfortunately, for Time magazine, there really is no You.