DID TIME MAGAZINE PICK RIGHT "PERSON OF THE YEAR"?

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

Mark Zuckerberg — Not Julian Assange? — Is Time’s Person of the Year
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/12/zuck/

Time Magazine took a vote then ignored the results. Readers chose Julian Assange as Time Person of the Year. Time Magazine crowned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as "Time Person of the Year" instead.

Then why the he@# did Time take a vote?

[Drale]

1. Either one as long as it wasn't Sarah "You Betcha" Palin

[Blue_In_AK]

2. You took the words right out of my mouth.

:thumbsup:

[reformist2]

3. So lame. They may as well have picked Ke$ha.

[Kalyke]

9. Wake up in the mornin' feelin' like P.Diddy...

Crap... just exposed my stupid side.

Seriously, that's a great dance song for young girls.

She has control. And "the party don't start 'til I walk in."

My 3-year-old loves the beat. I let her listen to it once I checked out the lyrics (we're in TN, where Ke$ha was raised, but my baby doesn't know Jack about Jack Daniels, yet).

[reformist2]

13. "The party don't start 'til I walk in." - Quote of the year.

I fell in love with the song the first time I heard that line! I was like, who IS this person??? LOL

[Voice for Peace]

4. Julian would be my vote but I don't know much about the other guy.

However I hope with his own vision of what's possible via internet he will appreciate Assange & Wikileaks and be a voice for sanity. Otherwise, bleh.. Facebook is ok but.... big deal. Doesn't uplift or help humanity for more than a few minutes at a time.

[stranger81]

5. Anyone know whether the person of the year is usually the person chosen in Time's popular vote?

In other words, is this an anomaly for them?

[Bucky]

6. Assange would need to have exposed a major scandal to be that important

He's throwing open a lot of embarrassing details and exposing some unpleasant secrets. But unless some heads roll, the leaks are not that big a deal. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg has changed how the human race keeps up with each other.

[Kalyke]

7. Who cares?

[alex cross]

8. It really depends on how important you feel it is.

Who was POY in 2008?

[Kalyke]

10. Heh... that's the point. I don't know off the top of my head and

we can't know who has checked Google before they claim they do.

[Orrex]

11. Fuck Zuck!

I was going to make a screamingly funny joke about Charlotte's Web, but the I remembered that it was Zuckerman's famous pig.

[MrModerate]

12. Peculiar. Facebook's been around for years and is really only an improved . . .

Myspace. Why now?

Full disclosure: I reaaaaally don't give a rat's ass about Facebook. It's just not my thing.

[TorchTheWitch]

14. People Need to Understand what "Person of the Year" is All About

It isn't "best" person of the year and never has been.

Both Bush Jr. and Hitler were named Time's Person of the Year (though in Hitler's day it was Man of the Year - women, apparently, weren't worthy of any notice).

Other horrible people selected in past years include: Joseph Stalin in 1939 and again in 1942, and the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. Actually, about half of the selections have been crappy people like Reagan, Nixon, Kissinger, Ken Starr, Rudy Giuliani, Ben Bernanke, Putin, Newt Gingrich... and on and on.

It's also never been and still isn't a reader's choice award. Actually, it's not even an award but a tradition of who or what to profile for the last issue of the year. Whoopie.

The criteria for selection has always been and still is "for better or for worse...has done the most to influence the events of the year."

That's the whole YEAR, mind you.

The selection also isn't limited to a person... it can be an individual, couple, group, idea, place or machine. So, it doesn't even need to be a person at all. In the past, classes of people, the computer and even planet earth were selected.

Take a look at some of the other selections in past years:

Hungarian Freedom Fighters in 1956
U.S. Scientists in 1960
Twenty-Five and Under in 1966
The Middle Americans in 1969
American Women in 1975
The Computer in 1982
The Endangered Earth in 1988
The American Soldier in 2003
You in 2006



This NOT a big deal. Do people here REALLY want Assange to receive such a distinction as Bush Jr., Hitler, Stalin, Nixon, Kissinger, Reagan, Newt Gingrish, Ken Starr, etc., etc., etc. have also received when named as Time's Person/Man of the Year? Be careful what you wish for. This distinction is about equally non-complimentary as it is complementary, and there's no telling which way people would see it.


Incidently, guess what group was selected for Time's Person of the Year in 2002? The Whistleblowers.
http://www.time.com/time/personoftheyear/2002/

You can see the whole list since its inception here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Person_of_the_Year

[MrScorpio]

15. None of the above...

Yeezy says that it should have been Beyonce!