Person of the Year?

Thanks, it was nothing. I just sent a few e-mails, paid a few bills online, put up a few blog entries and even started this blog, “Back on Earth.” (With this post!) For that I get named Time magazine’s Person of the Year!

What an honor. To be honest, I thought I’d never find this one on my resume.

OK, to be technical about it, it’s not just me. It’s also you … and you … and everybody else responsible “for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game.”

For this achievement, if you’ll permit that word, I/you/we have been named Time’s Person of the Year for 2006.

Is it just me, or does this choice seem, uh, silly?

Granted, cyberspace — or its latest variant, Web 2.0 — is extremely cool. It probably does represent the biggest change in human history since the development of writing or the automobile. Somebody sure as heck should get a gold trophy for it.

But … all of us?

For starters, some technophobes and poor people still don’t log on first thing in the morning or read newspapers from Europe online at midnight — and, I might add, still function quite well.
Even among “us,” there are lots of folks who are, shall we say, sittin’ in the wagon instead of pulling it. I’m talking about those who:

— spend hours drooling over porn,
— forward Urban Legends to everybody on their contact list,
— try to sell us things we don’t want or need,
— force their crackpot political beliefs or religious theories on everybody else.

And the list goes on. In the macro sense, the Web is wonderful. At the micro level, it still has a few flaws — and Time’s recognition doesn’t seem to differentiate. And how many proud members of our new global village haven’t talked to their sister in months or know the name of their next-door neighbor?

So thanks, Time, but next time pick an actual person to be Person of the Year, not an archetype, not a machine and certainly not everybody. After all, there are 6.6 billion members of Homo Sapiens on this planet. Surely one of us stood out since January.