Why Time Magazine's Person of the Year choice is SO Incredibly Revealing

Land Shark

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Wed Dec-15-10 08:19 PM
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Why Time Magazine's Person of the Year choice is SO Incredibly Revealing

Edited on Wed Dec-15-10 08:34 PM by Land Shark

From both internet policy perspectives as well as transparency and accountability perspectives, Time Magazine's Person of the Year choice is astounding. First, look at the choice of Person of the Year (named further below) in light of TIME Magazine's own Readers' Poll results

The Time Readers' Poll -- which is now closed -- shows Assange in first place, easily way ahead of everyone else for Time's 2010 Person of the Year:

1. Julian Assange 382,026 votes, and 92% avg rating (all voters)
2. Recep Tayyip Erdogan 233,639 (avg rating 80%
3. Lady Gaga 146,378 (avg rating 70%)
4. Jon Stewart and John Colber 78,145, (avg rating 81%)
{snip}
6. Barack Obama 27,478 (avg rating 58%)
8. the Chilean Miners 29,124 (avg rating 47%).
9. The Unemployed American 19,605 (avg rating 66%)
10. Marc Zuckerberg 18,353 (avg rating 52%)
{snip}
See http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2028734_2029036,00.html

SO, after the Time Readers' Poll, WHO IS TIME'S PERSON OF THE YEAR?

Well.... There was a "NOTE" attached to the Readers' Poll" to the direct effect that "TIME's editors who choose the actual Person of the Year reserve the right to disagree."

And, boy, did Time editors ever disagree with the people that are their own readers and customers.

With a publication date of today (December 15, 2010) they chose the 10th place finisher, Marc Zuckerbook of Facebook for the 2010 Person of the Year.

Zuckerberg got one lousy vote for every 20.8 votes Assange got from Time Readers' Poll, and more tellingly, all TIME readers voted on every candidate, and Zuckerberg got only about half the positive ranking Assange got for an average rating. (A 52% average rating for Zuckerberg, a whopping 92% for Assange).
See http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,2036683,00.html

But, to me, the biggest contrast and biggest shock, bigger than choosing the 10th place finisher over the first place finisher in the Readers' Poll, is the stark contrast between #1 Assange and #10 Zuckerberg on WHOSE transparency should get facilitated:

Assange is all about transparency/accountability for the powerful, while Facebook (while it has other functions) is about transparency (and necessarily accountability of various kinds) for the average people. Facebook for example, is being monitored by US government officials to gather information and intelligence on its own citizens in certain contexts. Things like Facebook make it enormously easier for the government to monitor aspects of the private lives of netizens
who often innocently think they're sharing just with their "Facebook friends."

TIME has had Hitler as man of the year decades ago, and routinely stresses that selection of a Person of the Year isn't a personal endorsement.

But it is telling, isn't it, that if TIME thinks Zuckerberg's social media is the wave of the present and of the future, TIME nevertheless had to resort to grossly undemocratic means to amplify the cause of a Facebook founder and ignore the overwhelmingly more popular cause of accountability / transparency for the powerful governments and corporations in the USA and around the world represented by Assange.

Simply put, on a definitional level: the person or entity that has the power to demand or force transparency on the other person or entity (like government) is the master, and the one who must yield their privacy pretty much whenever asked, and/or must be totally transparent when required is the servant or slave entity.

Despite the "relevance" of Zuckerberg, I find Time's choice to ignore its own readers and undemocratically choose Zuckerberg to be chilling when the type of "transparency" fostered by Facebook is compared to the type of real transparency offered and fostered by Julian Assange and
Wikileaks.

In the Assange/Zuckergerg contrast, the answer to the question of who are the ascending masters
and who the descending slaves is clear.

Well, unless, of course, Assange continues to win and decisions like TIME's Person of the Year debacle are exposed to a salutary form of transparency sometimes called criticism, or satire, or ridicule or better yet, irrelevance.

Of course, it can be argued that TIME's Editors were not thinking of this stark transparency contrast enough, including transparency's critical importance to both freedom and democracy at their very core. But that, is precisely the problem. They're not thinking much about the importance of transparency as the core of accountability that is the very heart of the freedom of self-government, aka democracy.

Why Time Magazine's Person of the Year choice is SO Incredibly Revealing

But, to me, the biggest contrast and biggest shock, bigger than choosing the 10th place finisher over the first place finisher in the Readers' Poll, is the stark contrast between #1 Assange and #10 Zuckerberg on WHOSE transparency should get facilitated:

Despite the "relevance" of Zuckerberg, I find Time's choice to ignore its own readers and undemocratically choose Zuckerberg to be chilling when the type of "transparency" fostered by Facebook is compared to the type of real transparency offered and fostered by Julian Assange andWikileaks.

The alternative to "going with polls" is going with dictatorship of some sort. Who really wants to go by a dictatorship? ONly people who are fooled into accepting the "expertise" of someone else like a small cabal of TIME editors.

Despite the "relevance" of Zuckerberg, I find Time's choice to ignore its own readers and undemocratically choose Zuckerberg to be chilling when the type of "transparency" fostered by Facebook is compared to the type of real transparency offered and fostered by Julian Assange and
Wikileaks.