Time calls time on YOU! and User Generated Content

It was just a few short years ago that Time magazine hailed YOU! (that is, US!) as "Persons of the Year" in celebration of the New New Thing - the move to User Generated Content.

How Time and times change. This year, Mark Zuckerberg was named Person of the Year.

Marvellous, I hear you say - who could deserve it more. Well, actually..... Julian Assange apparently.

You see, time also had a Readers Choice for Person of the Year, and Mr Assange won that. That's right, WE! (that is, YOU!) chose Juilian, but the Editorial team at Time chose Mark, despite their Readers' Voices (Mark Zuckerberg came 10th in the Readers votes by the way, Lady Gaga came 3rd)

Perish the thought that this was a manage of convenience - this is truly Democracy* in action

Can't help thinking they've been a bit short sighted here though. Mark Zuckerberg is "changing the world", Julian Assange has already changed it. By this I mean that Facebook is the "best of breed" currently of an evolving continuum, wheras Wikileaks has started a change like - as Clay Shirky puts it - the printing press being wrested away from the mediaeval Catholic church.

(An afterthought....the more I think about this, Time is merely showing why the mainstream media is increasingly being bypassed - they clearly did not have the bottle to go with the People's Choice because of the repercussions, and this lack of mainstream media nerve is pretty much why Wikileaks exists)

*True Democracy - ie what Actually Happens - is defined as asking a large number of people to vote, ignoring them, and doing what you want to do for your own ends. (See: Gulf War, Part II)

Update - the wags are in full force - one of the benefits of the rest of YOU being on the 'Net is the scurrilous humour - favourites so far:

(i) Zuck won because he is responsible for the leak of more private information than Assange.

(ii) Zuckerberg is the best "Oh Shit! We can't put Assange on the cover" candidate

(iii) WIKILEAKS exposes informatio­n from government­s and corporatio­ns to private individual­s.

(iv) The funniest - one of the judges apparently was a certain Meghan McCain (apparently Senator John McCain's daughter). She appears to be functionally illiterate.....)

FACEBOOK exposes informatio­n from private individual­s to government­s and corporatio­ns.

And the winner is …

Any more you lot out there saw?