It's Our TIME

Last Thursday, I posted a video on my YouTube channel. It was a response to a video by TIME Magazine's Managing Editor Rick Stengel's request for nominees for TIME's Person of the Year.

Well...Stengel and his colleagues decided to go in another direction, naming all of us bloggers, vloggers, MySpacers, Facebookers, et al., as this year's Person of the Year. I saw the choice and smiled.

Then, one of my YouTube subscribers let me know about the issue's Editor's Note, which says, in part:

The other day I listened to a reader named Tom, age 59, make a pitch for the American Voter as TIME's Person of the Year. Tom wasn't sitting in my office but was home in Stamford, Conn., where he recorded his video and uploaded it to YouTube. In fact, Tom was answering my own video, which I'd posted on YouTube a couple of weeks earlier, asking for people to submit nominations for Person of the Year. Within a few days, it had tens of thousands of page views and dozens of video submissions and comments. The people who sent in nominations were from Australia and Paris and Duluth, and their suggestions included Sacha Baron Cohen, Donald Rumsfeld, Al Gore and many, many votes for the YouTube guys.

This response was the living example of the idea of our 2006 Person of the Year: that individuals are changing the nature of the information age, that the creators and consumers of user-generated content are transforming art and politics and commerce, that they are the engaged citizens of a new digital democracy.

There's a measure of the changes we're witnessing/creating, right there.

All of us who've been engaged for any time in this groundswell of "user-generated content" (what a dweeby phrase!) know the excitement of discovering a voice that hits us just the right way, one who comes to insights that enlighten/entertain/infuriate. In the past few months I've discovered the joy of watching those folks discover the power of digital "face-to-face" conversations on YouTube.

What fun that's been.

I strongly encourage any of you who haven't done so to spend some time getting beyond the, "cats spinning on the ceiling fan" offerings on that remarkable service and find the people who Rick Stengel and his colleagues have cited as the year's most notable.

PS - It's cheating, slightly, but consider that video this week's Friday Featured Foto!

Comments

[niti bhan]

Yay!!!! Sorry for not commenting on some great posts you've made recently, tom, I did the 5 things you tagged me for however. Apparently typepad considers me a spammer from this India based PC connection - who knew????

[Andrea Hernandez]

OPEN LETTER TO TIME MAGAZINE EDITOR

Mr. Rick Stengel,

It is really amazing to see how corporate media, that is to say YOU, twist information as you wish. Until Saturday 16th December, HUGO CHAVEZ was leading your person of the year poll by 35% next to his contender, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who had 21%. And now today Sunday, 17th December, you decide to erase all records on your webpage and proclame YOU (that is to say the general public) the Person of the Year for 2006!!! This is an outrageous move. How dare you offend your readers and public opinion in general this way! Is this the democracy and the unbiased standards you defend? What happened? Does nominating Hugo Chavez go against your editorial line that is dictated from the corporations that keep the money coming in? This is absolutely sick and it is an open offense to the dignity, intelligence and opinion of us all.

If you and your big buddies don't like Hugo Chavez, well too bad. Most the world LOVES him, like it or not (as shown on your poll results). His leadership, his social and political advancements, his proposals and projects and his positions against this capitalistic world that is going down the drain is surely promising and inspiring for all of us who think the world is sick, the system is killing us with injustices, wars, ecological threats and the media (YOU) promoting these. We see in him the path of a new world for the coming, because we believe another world is not only possible it is URGENT and NECESSARY.

So, go on, I guess in a way it is not so bad you act like this, sooner or later, more and more people will wake up and start to question your ways. Long live Chavez, a new world and independent media!

Andrea Hernandez