So Time magazine, joined at the corporate hip to CNN, has picked "You" as its "Person of the Year." Well, it will be hard for any of us to dislike that choice, won't it? After all, aren't we all flattered to be accorded this honor, for all "our" hard work in terms of generating and aggregating content for YouTube and Daily Motion and 50 million or more blogs? Which is to say, Time has simply pandered to its readership. In its glory days, decades ago, Time would have scanned the horizon, and looked for the most newsworthy figure, including villains, such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Kim Jong Il of North Korea. After all, Adolf Hitler was a Time "Man of the Year," twice, and so was Josef Stalin. And the Ayatollah Khomeini. And by any good logic, Osama Bin Laden should've been the "Man of the Year" for 2001--what with 9-11 and all.
But Time has lost its standing with its audience, and so this Norma Desmond of magazines now has to grovel for its closeup with audience. Just give people what they want--and then beg them to take it.
Nothing wrong with the free market, of course, even at its most cynical and craven, but then one must ask: Why bother with magazines at all? Or editors? Why not just let RSS, or Google News be in charge of news-aggregation? Once again, nothing wrong with that, but Google News, or RealClearPolitics, or even the lefty Buzzflash, are free!
Call me old-fashioned, but I sort of like the idea of an editor who simply decides what's important and tells it to us. We have doctors who are expert at what they do, and we rely on them to help us cut through the "noise" of our own physical conditions and tell us what's serious and what isn't, and what's causing symptoms, and so on. So why not the same utilization-of-expertise for news? Nobody makes you watch, of course, but if you come to trust one outlet over another, then outlet ought to be your guide--your virtual Virgil, taking you, Dante-like, through the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradisio of our reality.
Meanwhile, in a relatedly interesting development, there's lots of corporate wrestling over this self-same issue of content aggregation, and who can aggregate it--what with everyone either suing YouTube, or joining with YouTube, or planning a rival consortium to take on YouTube. As a sign of the changing times, it's indicative that one of the new-media players watching this story is an outlet called Laptop Logic.
So, please keep your seatbelts fastened and your hands in the car--it's going to be a wild ride through the second century of The Cable Game.
