What you have in common with Adolf Hitler

Time magazine announced that their "Person of the Year" for 2006 is "You," and popped a mirror on the cover to further drum the concept home.

I kinda hope they did this mostly so that the news coverage would feature Onion-like sentences such as: "You beat out candidates including Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, China's President Hu Jintao, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and James Baker, the former U.S. Secretary of State who led Washington's bipartisan Iraq Study Group" (from Reuters).

Time says that the real reason is because of the explosion in popularity of user-generated internet sites like MySpace and YouTube. But the percentage of viral videos that are "user-generated" while also being popular seems a little skewed. ViralVideoChart.com says that the top ten viral videos of 2006 in terms of actual views include 2 from Britney Spears (apparently belching and discussing time travel, and again sending the text message breaking up with her husband), Michael Richards (racist rant), Lindsay Lohan (trashing Paris Hilton), 2 from Paris Hilton (crashing her car, and singing "Happy Birthday" to Hugh Hefner), Keira Knightley, model Katie Price, Pamela Anderson and Sharon Osbourne.

So all the viral video thing seems to prove is that we really love celebrities. Which hardly qualifies as news. And doesn't strike me as the sort of thing we should get all self-congratulatory about. Especially since what we apparently love is when they behave in ways which would cause us to feel something akin to shame if we knew them personally.

MySpace started as a site for bands to use for networking and promotion. Now it is the social networking site of choice, with popularity primarily among the teenage set. So having that as a reason for naming someone "Person of the Year" is analogous to giving a high school cafeteria, the instant or text message, or email the honor.

By the way, in order to see the article on Time's Web site, I first had to get past an ad for a luxury car which informed me that I might not be the "Person of the Year," but... Looks like somebody else didn't expect Time to do something quite as lame and unimaginative.

The Time article says that they peered out at 2006 and noticed "...community and collaboration on a scale never seen before ... 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."

I have to admit that I'm not sure what the last part even means. Reads to me like somebody's getting paid by the word.

And I think this might be more about voyeurism and exhibitionism. It's about a new way to take your hobby and go pro. I'm not claiming any high ground here: although the article doesn't say much about blogs, I'm lumping them in there with everything else.

There's nothing really new going on here. It's just a matter of distribution and technology. We've always been voyeurs and/or exhibitionists in one way or another.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that people can publish stuff globally from their homes, whether it's their theories about what's really happening on Lost, their deepest hopes and dreams and fears, or the clip of Uncle Fred getting hit in the nuts by a crochet ball. I think it's fantastic that we can all find like-minded people from across the globe, and that there are ways for people who might not otherwise feel like part of a community to feel included and listened to.

And maybe it's even a revolution, a total overhaul of human communication, but it still feels a little strange to be honoring "you" for having the same opinions you always had, for doing the things you might normally do, just in front of a larger audience. Or to honor "you" for watching, reading, or listening to the output, like you might have done if you were actually friends in real life with the people creating the stuff.

It's not like "you" invented these things. "You" just made them popular. It might have made sense if that was who was being honored. I'm guessing these inventors and innovators weren't chosen because most of them have sold their ideas to large companies, who now own the things we've made so popular.

They don't even mean what the cover implies. This year's honoree isn't just anybody who catches a glimpse of themselves in the cover at the newsstand. They only mean some of "you," those who are participating actively (or at least passively) in these new-fangled pursuits. This means they are excluding, among others, my grandmother. And I don't like it when people dis my grandmother.

But, hey, it's always nice to be honored by a national news rag for doing nothing more than living my life.

So thanks, Time. Does this thing come with a prize of some kind?