Congratulations!

"Congratulations! You are the the Time magazine 'Person of the Year.'" So begins the AP news story from yesterday's Chieftain. But don't call your mom just yet. It's not You the individual that Time magazine is celebrating...it's the collective You, the YouTube You, the "Consumer You" of Consumer Generated Media fame that is getting all the attention. If You've populated a MySpace page, stored Your photos on Flickr, or uploaded video clips to YouTube...You, according to Time magazine, control the Information Age!

"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, Time's Person of the Year for 2006 is you,"

the magazine's Lev Grossman wrote.


You must be feeling very special about now. I know that I feel about as special as the Tuesday blue-plate special at the local chain restaurant. It's enough to make me long for the good ol days when a computer was Time's Person of the Year. That was in 1982 for those of you too young to remember. Back then the computer was a PC, and the soulless man sitting at the keyboard was gazing at the monitor (displaying a line graph) as though it was a window to the future. Today, if you peer into the reflective monitor of the Macintosh computer on the cover of the December 26, 2006 issue of Time it reveals a person that looks just like you. How clever of them!


If you've learned anything this semester I hope you've learned this...that the transition to interactive media has been a change of enormous proportion. In the last few months you've blogged, contributed to wikis, navigated sites like GoogleMaps, Blogspot, Digg and Technorati and learned to transition from the lean-back TV to the lean-forward computer and all the while you've invested yourself in the future of media. Some of you have switched from couch-potatoes to mouse-potatoes. So I guess you've earned the right to go ahead and call your Mom and tell her that you're Time magazine's Person of the Year. Congratulations! You've earned it!